Page 109 of Taken By Shadows

Papers fluttered to the floor as I stirred the air in the still sanctuary, racing through the library past the Silent Servants.

I didn’t know where Eryk would be. If he’d be here at all. So I tried all the places I’d seen him before. The desks I’d been reading at, the balcony, the booths.

Each was empty save for a few late-night scholars. Eryk was not here.

My heart sank as I realised this might be the end of it for my plan. I didn’t know where he lived in the city. I didn’t even know his last name.

I slumped down in a heap alongside one of the stacks.

Cold despair reached for me in my chest, and I tucked my knees up around me.

I wasn’t sure why I cared so much. Kaed had come tonight to bring me back, physically. He’d picked me up and thrown me on his godsdamned horse. And I was here, trying to save him.

Because I cared. I cared what happened to him.

And I didn’t know how that made me feel.

But I knew feeling helpless was not what I wanted.

Watching them put the manacles on him again. Hearing his skin sizzle as the faebane began burning the magic in him, stripping him of his powers.

And he’d managed to resist it. Celeste had said they were demonstrably more potent than they should have been. And Kaed had been able to push himself to stand, to move under their force.

The hard shell of what I had felt before was being corroded by everything new I saw Kaed do. He had protected me. Even though he had just been raging at me for breaking his rules. He had been trying to shield me. He’d surrendered for me.

It wasn’t just for Hayden and his Crown or his father that he’d surrendered. Even though it made him entirely vulnerable to the council.

Kaed was strong.

And I cared seeing him stripped of that.

I couldn’t recognise that part of me that did.

It wasn’t pity I felt. But rage at the injustice of doing that to someone, to bind someone so tightly that they lost a piece of themselves.

A wave of frustration surged in me—that urge to kick and break and fight back at an invisible enemy.

I had an enemy. And it was the council. It was Varris. But I had nothing to fight them with.

I threw my head back and stared at the books all around me. Books upon books. Thousands. And all of them were useless because all I needed was for someone else to care about Kaed—just one other person.

But he wasn’t here.

I didn’t cry. I wouldn’t let myself. But I did have a very strong urge to wield some sort of magic to set this place ablaze and watch the pages float as ashes over the city. If magic flowed in me like water, I’d drown the useless pages around me like a lost city beneath the waves of my anguish.

But no magic flowed. And no one was here.

So I just sat in the dimming light of the fae orbs that bobbed softly in the stacks and aisles and into the night-shrouded hanging forest. And in the pale fae light of a male standing over me.

“Does the reading get more interesting from down there?” Eryk’s smooth voice washed over me. He stood above me, tall and slender, his icy blue and grey tunic lit by the fae light in his hand. He was here.

“Eryk …” I breathed as I scrambled to stand.

He offered me a hand, and I found it without hesitation.

“You’re here!” I beamed.

He looked around as if to check whether anyone had heard my outburst, then chuckled. “I am. But I don’t know why that matters.” A smile gathered at the corner of his lips. It was charming. Refined. Practiced. There was something perhaps boring about it that it didn’t have a hint of wickedness to it. But that was unfair. He was just Eryk. And he was here.