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Just like I was probably not worth a bond with mine.
My chest ached at the thought.
No. No, I couldn’t succumb to this.
Slap.
I flinched at the heat that spread across my cheek where Lorn had slapped me, rage pouring hot into my veins. “Stop it.”
She fondled my ass faster, harder. “Make me, pretty Raven boy.”
“I swear, if you don’t stop right this—”
Slap.“Make me!”
Black heat surged through my veins, burning me from the inside out, the simmering resentment giving way to a roaring fury that threatened to consume me alive. My hand shot out. I reached behind me, gripping her hair in an unrelenting fist, yanking her sideways.
I pushed her onto all fours with one hand, while I sank to my knees, then wrenched her trousers down with the other, laying her cunt bare. “You are a fucking disease, Lorn!”
She laughed. “Don’t hold back.”
Don’t hold back.
Those words cut deep and festered. The same ones Galantia had used that day behind the waterfall, their echo making my blood freeze over. What the fuck was I doing? No, no, no-no-no… I couldn’t keep doing this. Didn’t want to fucking keep doing this!
I grabbed her hair. One hard pull, and she slammed back against my chest. There, I held her tightly, leaning over until my face was inches from hers, my gaze locked on those pitch-black eyes submerged by her shadows. Always shadows. Fucking shadows!
“Tomorrow, you will do as you are bid. After that, I don’t want you to speak to me again. Dare to look in my fucking direction again, and I will forget what you and I went through. I will personally tie you down with my shadows until your mate manages to force a bond on you so he can take you and your poisonous, rotten soul to Hanneling Hold.”
The moon reflected in her glistening eyes, illuminating that single tear that rolled down her cheek. “You love her, don’t you?”
Bitterness spreading across my gums, I shoved her forward, rose, and turned back toward the tents.
“She will never love you back!” Lorn shouted. “You two will never be happy together. I won’t allow it!”
My feet stalled, a strange hollowness expanding in my stomach. “Has it ever crossed your mind that she might have put fire to that rope during our attack,”Sebian’s voice resonated my mind.
I turned around, grabbed her by her throat, yanked her up, and slammed her back against a tree until a bone crackled. “Stay away from my mate, Lorn. If you harm her in any way… if you so much as break a hair of her brittle strands, I will… kill… you.”
I dropped her, then turned and walked off, leaving her behind in the darkness as I headed for the bright fire.
ChapterTwenty-Five
Galantia
Present Day, kingdom of Vhaerya
“Ido not understand.” Asker stood beside me, donning his black ravenguard armor. His hands rested on his hips, his narrowed gaze fixed on a glinting something that seemed to scrape the wintery clouds far in the distance where it sat on a mountain cloaked in black plumes. “Goddess give me strength, I have not seen the sparkling shingles of Valtaris in…”
“Ten years,” Malyr marveled, the Raven prince equally transfixed by the sight, his thumb mindlessly brushing over the black cuirass he wore under his heavy cloak. “The shadows are moving; something I thought I had noticed last night, but I was not certain until now. They are drifting south down the mountain range, which must have cleared parts of the temple.”
I squinted at the unassuming speck on the horizon, whatever curious excitement I’d harbored about venturing this close to Valtaris shriveling in the sour pit of my stomach. There was nothing to see, nothing but shadows that mounted before us like black clouds so heavy with rain, they’d fallen off the sky to pile upon the earth.
“What’s south?” I asked.
Malyr turned his head my way, but his eyes never truly found mine. “You.”
I must have imagined that breathed reverence in his tone and cast my gaze to the shifting edges of the shadows before us, where they clawed at the snowy ground. They stretched as far as the eye could see to both sides, black tendrils coiling toward us. Or toward me?
