Page 66 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
“Yes.”
The ring against my chin vibrated with the lie. Maybe Draven was right. Maybe lying was all I knew how to do.
Hadn’t Wynnie told me the same thing? I lied to him and I lied to myself, hiding behind the bond like something in me hadn’t shattered at the idea of his life ending, even if it would have freed me from the bond.
He raised a single eyebrow, clenching his free fist until it was coated in ice. The moment stretched between us, piercing through the space that was heavy with all the secrets and half truths between us.
I lifted my hand to his shoulder, to the scar that had come so close to severing this bond. His lips parted, and I squeezed my eyes shut against the onslaught of need that overcame me. To touch him. To consume and be consumed by him, feel his breath against my skin and his pulse against my fingertips and know that he was still alive after the days I had spent terrified that he wouldn’t be.
The Unseelie are not capable of love.
Your kind.
Kill on sight.
I shouldn’t want him, or this. Even if there was nothing close to disgust in the way he dragged his thumb along the bottom curve of my lip.
“I’m so tired of being weak.” I realized too late I had spoken the words aloud.
But it was true. I was tired of being taken and tortured and used and hated, tired of the nightmares that tormented me as surely as my captors had, and sick to death of trying not to want someone who tortured and threatened at will, someone who despised everything I was.
I opened my eyes on his exhale of surprise.
“Weak?” His tone was low, sharp, slicing through to my marrow. “You are many things, Morta Mea.”
He tightened his grip on my chin, stepping close enough that I could feel the heat of his bare skin through the thin fabric of my nightgown. “A liar and a traitor, among them.”
The words were a caress against my skin, falling with a gentleness that belied the insults beneath.
“But you have never come close to being weak.”
He was so close that I could taste the veracity of his claim, could feel his conviction against my waiting lips. I knew it was a mistake, could practically feel the regret dancing along my spine even before I moved.
But I didn’t try nearly hard enough to stop myself from leaning the rest of the way into his touch and finally, finally pressing my lips against his.
Draven
She tasted the same.
Like moonshade berries, sweetness edged with the barest hint of poison. Like she could be the death of me in truth.
She kept one hand poised over the scar from the night the world had shattered the fragile ground we had built. The other hand snaked along the ridges of my shoulders. She dragged her nails through my hair, leaving fire in their wake.
The last time I had been this close to her, she had been tenuous, but there was no hesitation now. She fisted the short strands of my hair, pulling me against her with a needy moan that nearly brought me to my knees.
I pressed my thumb along the lower edge of her mouth until her lips parted, then I dipped my tongue inside her mouth in an exploration that was a slow and deliberate contrast to her frenzied breathing.
Heat pulsed through me in time with the mana that spread from my limbs, engulfing the room in a thick coating of ice. All but the space around us—around her.
I teased at the seam of her nightgown, dragging it upward along her thigh, and she entwined her tongue with mine withurgency. When I kept my pace steady, her teeth clamped around my lip, a protest and a demand in one.
Shards damn it all.
“Was there something you needed, Morta Mea?” I growled, nipping her ear, then her neck.
Tell me that you want this.
She let out a low string of curses in response, moving her free hand from my chest to my shoulder, tugging it with purpose.
