Page 74 of Taken By Shadows

I considered the chamber I was in. The members of this city who currently held that power. And I shuddered to think what people without rules and morals would use it for.

“If we push against it too hard, fight the suppression, it will do more than just take our magic.”

Unease etched across my face.

“Don’t worry.” He shrugged as if he wasn’t currently being tortured. “There isn’t enough in these to do more than sting.”

Flexing my hand open and closed, I examined my burn. Sting? His understanding of pain was far different from mine.

There was something odd about knowing I had some element of fae in me. I became lost in my own thoughts.

Kaed moved so fast I didn’t have time to process it. I looked up from the mark on my hand directly into Kaed’s face, which was now only inches from mine. I blinked at the sudden nearness of him crowding me. The chains that bound his wrists now encircled me, the links pressing into my back. They didn’t burn through the fabric, but I felt the searing heat of being chained to Kaed regardless.

“Care to let me out now?”

Stuttered half sounds, barely words, tumbled from me. I tried to push away from his grip, but he caged me as surely as the iron around us.

“Going to let go of me?” I tried to steady my heartbeat as I quirked a brow up at him.

In response, he gripped me tighter.

Breathe.

His body up against mine felt like a roaring furnace. My breaths came quick and shallow, and I struggled to control the erratic rhythm of my heart. There was a heat and intensity I couldn’t deny when I was close to him. Maybe he felt it too.

His hair fell over his eyes as they focused on my lips, watching the smallest movements I made, everything.

I was pressed close to him. It had been different when he’d held me under the fae lights of the party. His eyes had been hard, unmoving, like ice. Now they blazed with blue fire as they pinned me.

My mind urged me to look away, to tear my gaze from his. To quell the heat that poured from his body as it pressed into mine, the bite of the chains around my waist.

But I didn’t look away.

Instead, I squared my jaw and steadied my stare as I looked right back at him. I would let him out after I got what I needed. There was no point lying to myself … His body felt good where it was right now.

“I might have you at a disadvantage in here.” I allowed the tendrils of heat I’d felt deep in my core slip into my voice.

Despite being trapped between Kaed’s chest and the chains that held him, the power dynamic had shifted between us. He no longer had the status, the strength, the magic. He didn’t even have his freedom.

And I was pressed to him, caged with the animal I could see scratching at the surface to be let out.

I held the key between my fingers. He could have taken it from me by force instead of wrapping his arms around me, pinning me to him. But he hadn’t. He wouldn’t. A tiny thread of something spun through me, and the truth of it stitched into me. He could have hurt me, taken the key from me, but he hadn’t.

I held the key under his chin like I had with the dagger when we’d first met.

“Not the first time I’ve felt at your mercy.” A wolfish grin spread across his lips, and I had a very strong and sudden urge to trace them with my tongue.

“Feel familiar?”

“It feels like you are far too pleased with these chains,” he said as he took a step into the point of the key so it firmly pressed into his chin and drove it upwards.

“It’s a nice change to see you bound, not me.” His chest was a collection of taut muscles as he crowded me. My mind betrayed me as it conjured vivid images of him lying before me, straining against tight corded ropes, his chest bare … his …

My eyes snapped closed and then open as I tried to clear the heated thoughts.

I hoped he couldn’t detect the erratic beat that flickered through my veins. The panic I felt fluttering through me, licking over my skin until it dropped lower.

Much lower. Too low.