Page 8 of Bound to the Shadow Queen
The word left me in a whisper as I followed the carved ridges, wings arched like a dragon poised for flight in the amethyst’s dark gleam.
To rise.
She eased away from me, peering down at me with emerald eyes that were widened in concern, the rest of her graceful features as fierce and unreadable as ever.
Her gaze swept over me like she was drinking in the sight of me, cataloguing every injury and marking every change from the broken adolescent she had last beheld. I surveyed her in return, the intricate obsidian warrior’s braid that was so familiar. The scars along her skin that weren’t.
How many battles had she seen since I left?
“How are you here?” I rasped out, still only half believing she was real.
She pursed her full lips, eyes darting for the barest fraction of a moment toward my uncle.
“Where else would I be?” she countered evenly.
I had the sense that I had been thrown in the middle of a game I couldn’t quite name, where the rules were always changing and the stakes were always death.
Still, my mother was here.
My mother wasalive. And still working with my uncle.
My fingers slipped from the pendant, falling back to my side as the warmth of nostalgia and relief soured into something harder.
Had she been at his side all this time—ten long years with her abomination of a daughter out of the way—serving as hisstellari?
I thought of her rage when I was taken, her panic when she set me free. The warring perceptions of her didn’t quite fit, but then again, nothing about this situation did.
“Why did you bring me here now?” I demanded quietly.
Why not before if it was possible? Why ever, if it wasn’t?
A line furrowed in her brow. “Because you were in danger,” she said like it was obvious.
Had she kept an eye on me since I went to my father’s? Enough to know that I had been safe there? Enough to know that I wasn’t, once I was married? Did she weigh the danger of my husband against my uncle and make a choice, or did the Thane discover where I was and remove that choice?
And why wouldn’t she have at least let me know she was alive?
Those were questions I wasn’t willing to ask in front of my uncle.
“And I’m not in danger here?” I clarified.
“Things are different now.” She wrapped her hand around mine, squeezing gently. A reassurance? A warning? I wasn’t sure. “What matters now is that you’re back where you belong, and we can finally put everything else behind us.”
I blinked, not ready to address the second part of her statement. Or the first part, for that matter.
I wanted to bask in the relief that she was alive, the comfort that she was real and in front of me, but there were so many missing pieces that didn’t yet make sense.
“Is this the mutually beneficial arrangement you were referring to, then?” I asked the Thane, gesturing to my mother.
But what did he get in return?
“It is to all of our benefit that you retain your rightful place as heir,” he said vaguely.
I narrowed my eyes at his non-answer. My identity was hardly a secret anymore, let alone my lineage. How could itbenefit him to have a bastard half-Seelie abomination as his heir?
“Would you rather I had left you there to die at the hands of the Frostgrave King?” the Thane demanded.
He might have sounded genuinely curious, if I hadn’t caught the deadly undertone.
