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“Save it for the dungeon,” I ground out, then I knelt beside Reagan. Her heartbeat was strong, but slow. She needed to shift back to heal. Without looking away I said, “By the time I’m done, you’re going to wish she’d killed you.”
The things I did to traitors were famous, and yet that wasnothingcompared to what I would do to the woman who’d hurt my mate.
Regardless of how difficult she was making our situation, she was still mine. For her to be injured under my roof . . . a shudder ran through me, and more shadows poured from my skin.
Once they’d called me the light; they rejoiced at my name.
Having my soul torn before being thrown in Tartarus changed me to my very core. It changed my magic. Now I was darkness. I was shadow. I was death.
To all buther.
“Reagan,” I said quietly, stroking my fingertips down the side of her neck. I wanted to take stock of her injuries but there were too many.
“Come on, my love,” I whispered. “You need to fight it.” A low whine went through her, the sound gutting me. Her eyelids blinked, slow to open, but when they did, it wasn’t pain that filled them.
It was fire, vengeance, and fury.
Good.She was still fighting.
Blood vessels had popped around her iris, staining her eyes with red starbursts around the brown. In this form it was so dark, only one shade from black.
“Shift, Reagan,” I said. “It’s the only way you’ll heal.”
She stared at me but did nothing.
A terrible thought crossed my mind. She didn’t know how to shift.
Fuck.
“Visualize the change,” I urged, hoping I could walk her through it. “Imagine your bones breaking, rearranging until you’re you again. Picture who you want to be.”
She blinked again and if not for that fuck-off-stare, I might have wondered if she’d recognized me.
Instead of letting my increasing anxiety take over, I whispered low assurances and explained shifting as well as I could. While I wasn’t a shifter, it was still a power I possessed. Under different circumstances, I would have felt triumphant that my mate was a dark unicorn of all things. A shadow shifter of lore, hiding amongst mortals.
Right now, I just hoped she could shift back to herself.
Fast footsteps sounded down the hall.
“What’s going on—” My brother’s voice broke off sharply as he crossed the threshold, his wide eyes taking in the bloody scene. “Fuck,guards! Pol! Where’s your feathered ass when we need?—”
“Get Jana to the dungeons and find Clara. In that order.” I didn’t need to tell him to hurry. Abyssian didn’t waste a second manhandling the elk shifter out the door and dragging her down the hall as she cried out.
“Reagan, you're losing too much blood.Shift,” I commanded again. The alpha tone should have worked on her, but all it did was seemingly piss her off. I bit the inside of my cheek. This couldn’t happen. I couldn’t find my mate just to lose her because she never learned to shift.
I refused.
“Fucking hell, Reagan,” I cursed, rolling up my sleeves. She flinched and twisted when I laid a hand on her. “If you don’t want me to touch you, thenshift.”
To my surprise, her bones began to pop and crack. Blood smeared the floor as her body broke itself all over again with such slow agony that I started to worry she wouldn’t be able to finish shifting back.
But she did.
Finally.
A weight lifted from my shoulders when her naked form curled up on the floor in the fetal position. I pulled her into my lap, wrapping my arms around her to calm my own emotions.
“I’m fine,” she coughed. “You don’t have to?—”
