Page 90 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
The contact sent a shiver of heat racing through me.
For the past decade, my wings have been a secret, something to hide, something that marked me as other. And they had been the source of every contention between us from the day he brought my broken body back to the palace.
And yet Draven’s palm settled there with devastating care, reverent almost, as if he’d reached past every wall I’d built and found the most fragile part of me.
My entire world narrowed to that single point of heat, my body betraying me, arching faintly into his touch even as my mind screamed to pull away.
But his fingertips were moving now, tracing along the delicate edges with a gentleness that belied every monstrous act I knew to be true.
Even his mana was quiet, the only sound in the room his low, measured breaths. Only his, because I had stopped breathing the moment his hand touched my wing.
His fingers moved in slow, deliberate patterns, dragging heat into places that should have been too cold to feel anything at all. My lips parted, a gasp escaping me before I could help it, even as tears stabbed at the backs of my eyes.
The trip to the estate had left me so defeated, the glaring evidence of a lifetime of having to hide. No one saw both sides of me. Wynnie tried, but even she spent her life teaching me to fold the dangerous parts away. To hide. To survive.
And now my Unseelie-hating husband was here, touching the wings I had always been told to bury, like they weren’t something worth keeping.
“Does it hurt, when you keep them inside?” His voice was low, even, his breath ghosting on my ear as he mapped a path along each ridge and line of the sensitive skin.
I was so caught up in the heat that spread from the path he was forging that it took me far too long to make sense of what he was referring to. Zerina, asking me how I could bear it.
“Sometimes.” The word rasped out of me, rougher than I meant it to be.
His fingers continued tracing a path from the base at my spine out to the farthest tip of my wing, gently following the curves and arches of each ridge.
A wave of heat slowly washed over me, flooding my veins, beginning with my wings, before moving inward to pool low in my core.
Draven tracked every flicker of my reaction in the window’s reflection.
“And this?” he asked, stroking a particularly sensitive area. “Does this hurt?”
Not in the traditional sense of the word, not pain as I understood it. But having Draven touch my wings and knowing we would be right back where we always landed was its own kind of torture.
Because I already knew how this ended. Where we always ended—balancing on the edge of a knife, teetering somewhere between want and ruin.
The truth spilled out before I could wrestle it into something safer.
“In a way.”
He paused, his hand stilling against me. I turned just enough to meet his gaze. His pupils were blown wide, features carved with intent.
Once again, I felt the tug of our bond. The pull that our blood vow had over us, begging me to step closer, demanding me to lean in.
To let go.
To fall.
But this…this was never the problem between us.
“What are we doing, Draven?” I asked softly.
He stilled, but didn’t move his hand from my wing.
“I see it now.” His voice was quieter, its deep timbre trailing fire along my skin.
His fingers slid, almost by accident, along a thin, sensitive vein at the base of my wing. It was barely a whisper of a touch, but it drew a gasp from my lips.
“See what?” I breathed, looking back at his reflection in the window.
