Page 53 of Shadowed

I go to it because I need something to do with my hands.

He doesn't tell me not to. He follows, and then he stands behind me—close, not touching, but close enough that I can feel the warmth coming off his wings—and I work the lock and I do not think about how close he is or what I can smell or the specific pressure of the bond pulling at the base of my skull.

My hands don't shake. They're better with him watching and I hate that too.

Five tumblers and twenty minutes and the lock opens.

A corridor stretches into darkness I can't read. Cool air moves through it—deep-earth cold, the temperature of things that have been waiting a long time.

"What's in there?" I ask.

"I don't know. The court built it three days ago." He's close enough that his voice comes from just behind my left ear, and the mark at my throat turns toward him like a compass. "It's waiting for you, not me."

I look at the corridor. I think about six weeks of this court rearranging itself around my presence. Shadow-flowers growing for my palm. Locks appearing in walls. A garden made for someone the palace decided should have one.

A corridor into darkness that's waiting for me, not him.

"Not yet," I say.

"No."

I close the lock and turn around and he's closer than I expected—right there, wings half-spread, filling the entrance to the garden, the marks on my skin going loud and obvious in his proximity. My cunt aches. I hold his gaze and don't let either of us see what that costs me.

"You've already won," I say. "You know that."

"Yes."

"I want you to know that I know that."

He looks at me for a long moment. Something in his expression that isn't the flat certainty—something older, quieter, that he hasn't let me see before. Then it's gone.

"Come back inside," he says. "You need to eat."

"I don't want?—"

"I know." He steps back, making room, not quite the gesture of someone waiting for her. The gesture of someone who doesn't need to wait because she's coming anyway. "Come anyway."

The marks pull. The bond pulls. The ache between my legs says yes with the cheerful idiocy of a body that made its decision last night and hasn't reconsidered.

I go anyway.

I hate that I go anyway.

I go anyway.

21

LILITH

Marcus is wearing a proper coat.

Not a charity coat, not a hand-me-down three sizes too large with the elbows worn through. A proper coat—dark wool, fitted, brass buttons. He stands in the palace receiving room that Caligo dressed up as a merchant's parlour and he looks like a young man. Not a hungry boy. Not a rookeries kid in stolen clothes doing his best impression of respectable. A young man with filled-out shoulders and a voice that has dropped a full register since the last time I heard it.

"Lily, you look well." He says it carefully. Marcus is careful about everything—he was the one who counted the money after I counted it, the one who checked the locks after I picked them. Careful Marcus, who learned early that the world will rob you if you let it.

"You look like you're eating."

"Three times a day." He grins. The grin is new. He didn't used to grin. "The school has a refectory."