Page 51 of Shadowed

I put my hand over hers on my forearm. The court pulses at seventy-eight percent around us and the shadows tell stories I'm not ready to say in words, and the stories are true, and I let them.

20

LILITH

Imoved before he woke. Professional instinct—never be the one caught sleeping when the other party has information you don't.

His arm was around my waist. His cock a warm lazy weight against the back of my thigh, and the memory of what it had been doing six hours ago lit up every nerve I owned in one long involuntary flash. I held still for a moment. Breathed through it. Got my hands working.

Getting out required sliding his arm off without waking him, which required patience I didn't have and silence I managed anyway because I've been moving around sleeping people in the dark since I was six.

His shadows stirred when I stood. The lazy curl of something that was resting and notices what it was resting against has moved. I held still. Waited. The shadows settled.

I left anyway.

Three corridors back to my room. Every step pulled at the bond like a fishhook in my sternum. I held myself upright, counted the corridors, and didn't go back.

Now I'm in my own room, sitting on my own bed, doing what I do.

Assess.

The marks at my wrists are new. I didn't notice them during—during. Dark patterns in shadow-ink, crawling slowly up the inside of my arm from wrist to elbow, the same moving patterns as the ones at my throat. I trace them with one finger and they shift toward my touch. I pull my hand away. They shift back, slowly, like something disappointed.

The body: sore. Everywhere. My thighs ache from being held open. My wrists are tender where shadows pinned them. My nipples are raw. My cunt is swollen and slick and there's a deep ache inside me that isn't pain exactly—the memory of being full past the point of having a word for it. The ache says more. The ache is an idiot.

The problem: I have nothing left. The lock-picks are useless, every lock in this court opens for me. The knife is ornamental. My siblings are thriving on someone else's money. I'm twenty years old and I've made myself unnecessary.

His shadows found me twenty minutes after I arrived.

They came through the gap under the door and pooled in the corner near the window and didn't approach. Just sat there being present in the way he is present: patient, watching, impossible to ignore.

"Go away," I said.

They didn't.

I went to the garden instead.

---

There's a lock in the garden wall that wasn't here yesterday. Three tumblers, shadow-forged, the mechanism exposed the way training locks are in apprentice workshops. Beautiful workmanship. A lock made by someone who understood what a good lock is.

The palace made me a lock.

I sit cross-legged on the dark stone, pull out my picks, open it in twelve seconds. Behind the wall: a second garden. Smaller, darker, flowers that glow faintly silver. The silver light catches the marks on my wrists and they shift in it, rearranging.

I step through.

I feel him before I hear him—the bond, and then the low pulse of the mark at my throat, and then the particular quality of the air when he's in a room. Cool. Charged. Like the moment before a storm breaks.

I don't turn around.

"I wasn't asleep."

I close my eyes. Six years of moving through dark rooms without waking anyone and he felt me the moment I started.

"How long?"

"When you lifted my arm."