Page 72 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
A muscle tensed in his jaw, and he looked out the window to where the faint shimmer of the wards gleamed in the distance.
“Something tried to breach them.”
The dread came back in full force. I took a steadying breath.
“What would have the power to do that?” I asked.
Draven must have pierced through the wards around the Shadow Clan to get to me, but those wards weren’t connected to ancient ward stones. Unseelie wards came from the earth’s mana, and though they were a deterrent, they weren’t impossible to breach. Even then, Draven might have been one of the only people alive who could have forced his way in.
So who or what was powerful enough to force their way through wards that took his substantial mana and amplified it?
His aurora gaze returned to me, his voice low and dangerous when he responded. “I don’t know. It’s never happened before.”
Something niggled at the back of my mind, something hazy, but he spoke again before I could put it together.
“I’m going to check the wards now, reinforce them if needed,” he said, his attention drifting down to my thigh.
“Do you have your dagger?”
“Always.” Since Wynnie had returned it to me, I never took it off my thigh.
“I need it to test something with the wards.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to quell an unreasonable surge of panic in my chest at being separated from my only means of defense. Again.
“So by something, you mean you think this is the Unseelie?” Why else would he want my weapon in particular?
That brought a whole new surge of emotion. Had my mother come for me when she didn’t receive word? Had she told my uncle where I was?
Then again, there were far more Unseelie in the Wilds than the Skaldwings, and they all had reason to target my husband.
Frost climbed out from Draven, creeping in spiderwebs across the floor in time with his irritable tendrils of mana.
“Potentially,” he allowed darkly. “With enemies all around, it’s hard to say.”
He could have been referring to the Unseelie and the monsters and his own court, but I got the slightest feeling that he was also referring to his wife. I didn’t know what to say to that.
I didn’t know if we were enemies anymore, but I sure as hells didn’t know what else to call us. Allies didn’t exactly lock one another up.
He took a step toward me. “Lumen will guard you tonight.”
“Oh, am I allowed visitation now?” I shot back, pretending I didn’t know what he was getting at.
He narrowed his eyes, moving until he stood only inches from me. “You are allowed aguard, but I need that dagger. So you can hand it over, or I can take it.”
There was the smallest, unreasonable part of me that was tempted to call his bluff. To see if the same male that had recoiled only hours ago would actually drag his hand along my thigh.
But that was a road neither of us needed to go down, no matter which way it turned. So I dragged my skirt up, choosing to ignore the way his gaze tracked the motion, and pulled out the dagger, flipping it in my hand before giving it to him.
He took the dagger wordlessly, carefully avoiding contact with my skin. Because of the reminder of what I was? Or because sometimes our bond was too…eager for our physical proximity?
All the things we were and the things we couldn’t be seemed to fill up more space than we had in the room, sucking out all of the available air until my lungs refused to expand, and my vision was swallowed up entirely by the endless shift of the aurora skies.
Draven let out a low exhale that cut a jagged path through the tension flooding the room.
He crossed the floor, not to the door between our rooms, but to the larger one that led to our shared hallway. As soon as he opened it, Lumen bounded in with more energy than I had ever seen him exhibit.
His oversized presence and comforting familiarity were enough to snap me out of the moment. I let out a breathy laugh, using my non-Batty hand to pat the guard in question on the head.
