Page 91 of Shadows so Cruel

I hurried after Galantia, because this needed patching before I lost my damn mind. I caught up with her in the great hall, where servants scurried about, polishing silver and replacing candles in the massive golden chandeliers that dangled from the ceiling’s tarred crossbeams.

I grabbed her arm and pulled her against me, a jab piercing through my chest at the sight of her glossy eyes. “Come here, sweetheart.”

Curling her little fingers into my shirt, she sank into my embrace, her entire body turning sluggish as if she’d held in too much tension for too long. “I’m so exhausted.”

“I know.” She’d gone from not knowing who she was, to the thief who’d lifted a curse within a matter of weeks. Then there was her frustration over not being able to wield shadows. “Care to finally tell me what the fuck he did now?”

She blinked up at me, her lips parting and closing about as many times as she shook her head before she said, “He didn’t do anything. It was me.”

That… was not what I’d expected her to say. “What do you mean? What did you do?”

“I don’t… I don’t know.” Her voice wavered, the corners of her mouth twitching. “One moment, everything was fine. But then he just… stiffened. He got angry.”

“You know he has a temper.” Something that Asker and I agreed had improved drastically, otherwise Malyr would already be on his way to those farms to take care of the issue in one deadly sweep. “He’s trying to control himself better, now that he syphons into you.”

“That’s what made it so bad,” she all but whimpered. “I expected his shadows to lash out that evening, but they didn’t. He was a different kind of angry. I don’t know how, but… it felt terrible. Pitch black and… sad.”

“And that happened in the spring?” When she nodded, I cupped her beautiful face. “Did you say something to anger him?”

She shook her head. “No. All I did was… well, touch him. I thought he liked it; he sounded like he liked it.”

A foreboding tightness settled into my stomach, making me scan the great hall for pathfinders, then ushered her into an empty corridor for good measure. “Touched him… how?”

“I…” Her voice faded, and her noisy gulp had my ears prick. “I touched his… buttocks. Grabbed it, and kneaded it, and just fondled—I really thought he liked what I did. I don’t understand why he got so angry.”

That tightness twisted my guts, putting a bitter taste on the back of my tongue. No, of course she didn’t understand. She had no fucking clue that he’d been so viciously raped in those dungeons that he’d bled from his ass when I’d found him. The worst part? How he hadn’t moved an inch when I’d pulled his bloodied trousers down to tend to the tears and cuts. He’d just… laid there, his soul so fucking crushed that he hadn’t even questioned a stranger feeling him up down there.

I tortured my upper lip for a moment. How did one explain that kind of depravity to a soul as sweet as Galantia?

Ten years. Ten years of friendship with Malyr, and not once had he brought it up, and neither had I. It was silently understood. If he would ever tell her… well, I doubted it. That didn’t make it my place to do it for him, but neither could I shrug it off and say nothing.

“Do you remember how angry you got the night of the feast, hmm? When he let his shadows play with you, getting you dripping wet?” I tilted her head back a little, then lowered my mouth to her forehead in a long, gentle kiss. “Do you remember what I told you in that corridor?”

Her pupils flitted across my face for a moment before she nodded. “That I was just angry at myself.”

“Sometimes, we lash out at others when, in reality, we’re just mad at ourselves for liking something we think we shouldn’t.” I thumbed those lips I couldn’t get enough of kissing good morning, kissing good night, and kissing a dozen more times in-between when nobody was looking. “Or maybe we simply don’t want others to know because… because it shames us that we feel that way. Or how we got to feel that way. Maybe it’s something that was once so unpleasant, it’s shameful for us to find pleasure in it now. Do you understand?”

Her frown suggested that she didn’t, but all I could do was try to help them overcome this. “Will you walk with me? I’d like some fresh air.”

“Go grab a cape or something because they opened the wind barriers, so it’s chilly,” I said. “Let me go back in there to check on Malyr. I’ll come to our chamber and get you.”

ChapterThirty-Seven

Malyr

Present Day, Valtaris, throne room

I’d inspired all sorts of reactions in Galantia over the last few months. She’d feared me, despised me, loathed me, but that look of somber disappointment just now?

It had gutted me.

“Does she not understand?” I asked Asker, who’d moved to stand at the bottom of the stairs to a throne that had always seemed so imposing, but now turned out to be quite uncomfortable. “With the risk of Aros withholding grains, Deepmarsh sitting in a marsh, and Tidestone already eating up resources for its restoration, how am I to feed the hundreds of Ravens that are returning to Valtaris each day? Am I so wrong to want those humans gone? After all the atrocities we’ve endured from them?”

There was a long string of varying vowels, nothing but noise before he finally mumbled, “It is said that a bonded royal pair ought to rule together, not because one of them is likely right, but because they are both likely wrong, and—”

“The right way is somewhere in the middle,” I said on a sigh. “My mate is smart, resourceful, and quick at figuring things out. But she is also still very naive about war and the hardships outside a castle’s walls. What am I supposed to do?”

“Not slaughter a bunch of unarmed farmers.” In a burst of shadows, Sebian’s unkindness dashed forward, only for him to slump himself on the stairs to my throne, looking so enviously comfortable with how he eased himself back onto his elbow and sprawled his legs out. “Unless, of course, you preferred to roost outside on one of the dead trees all along.”

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