Page 52 of Shadowed

I turn around because I won't have this conversation with my back to him. He's standing at the garden entrance, wings half-spread, shadows curling at his feet, and the marks at my throat don't just pulse—they pull. Toward him. Like they know where they came from and want to go back.

My cunt clenches. I keep my face still and hate myself.

He sees it anyway. The corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. Something more satisfied than that.

"You let me go," I say.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you needed to run." He pushes off the entrance and moves into the garden, and every step he takes toward me the mark gets louder and the ache between my legs gets worse, and I stay sitting because standing would require walking toward him or away from him and neither of those is an option I trust myselfwith right now. "And because you'll be back. You're already back."

"I came to the garden."

"You came to where I'd find you." He stops a few feet away and looks down at me in the silver flowers with the expression of someone who caught exactly what he was hunting and is deciding how long to let it think it's free. "There's a difference between those two things. You know it."

I don't answer. He crouches down—wings folding, bringing himself level—and the closeness of him is its own problem. I can smell him. His court on his skin, cool mineral dark, and underneath that the specific smell of what we did last night, still on him, and my body responds to it like I'm still in heat and everything between my thighs goes hot and slick and the marks crawl up my throat.

"The siblings," I say. "That arrangement doesn't change."

"It doesn't change."

"Even if whatever this is doesn't?—"

"It's already done." His voice is quiet. Absolute. "Your body sealed it. Your locks sealed it. The marks on your skin are permanent, little thief. There is no whatever this is. There is only what it is."

I look at the marks on my wrists. "What do they mean? Practically. If I tried to leave the court?—"

"Other courts would see them and know what you are." He reaches out. Not asking. His thumb presses against the inside of my wrist, over the darkest part of the marks, and the sensation travels straight up my arm and into my chest and I don't move. I don't breathe. "Shadow Court claimed. Mine. The marks tell any Fae court that taking you would mean answering to me."

"And if they tried anyway?"

"They'd regret it." Simple. "I've been waiting seven centuries for seventy-eight percent. I'm not charitable about threats to it."

He's still holding my wrist. His thumb moves, once, slow—tracing the line of a mark—and the heat that rolls through me is not the heat. The heat is gone. This is something else. This is my body remembering in specific anatomical detail what those hands did and wanting it to happen again.

I pull my wrist back. He lets me, which is almost worse—the ease of it, the certainty that letting me go costs him nothing because I'm not going anywhere and he knows it.

"The palace built this garden before I asked it to," he says. "The lock appeared two weeks ago. The garden a week before that."

"I know. You said the court recognises me."

"I said it recognises what you are before you do." He stands, and the loss of his nearness is a physical thing—the mark cools, the pull eases, and I hate that the easing feels like loss. "Your body already knows what it wants. You're the last one still pretending otherwise."

"I spent five nights in heat. My body wanted everything."

"Not everything." His eyes move over me, unhurried, the way they moved over her locks the first week—assessing, cataloguing, finding the mechanism. "You begged me to stop. Your body spent all night disagreeing with you. And when you weren't arguing—" the corner of his mouth moves again, "—when you stopped pretending?—"

"Don't."

"—you were magnificent."

The word lands in my chest and stays there and I have no response to it that doesn't give him something, so I say nothing.

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There's a second lock in the wall of the silver garden. Five tumblers, tighter tolerances, shadow-wards layered over the mechanism like frost over a window.