Page 17 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)

Everly

Darkness and pain.

I was no stranger to either, but they felt different this time, edged by a grief I couldn’t quite name. It gnawed at me, just out of reach, punctuating each brief moment of consciousness, the faraway sensation of losing something I couldn’t quite remember.

Or someone.

I heard my sister’s voice, felt her lips on my forehead. I’m here, Evy. Cool hands on my skin. A trilling sound that seemed to echo all the grief that was twining through the marrow of my bones.

Starlit tears spilled onto a pool of blood that froze into a shimmering crimson rose, beautiful and unspeakably sad. Then the rose exploded, the shards embedding into my skin.

It hurt. Everything hurt.

Not like this, Morta Mea.

The voice burned into my soul, furious and unrelenting, wresting me back from the edge of darkness, step by painstaking step.

They will not take something else that belongs to me.

So familiar, that tone, that fury, that unending possession that drove me to madness.

I don’t belong to you. The rebuttal sounded weak, even in whatever halfway reality I existed in.

A dark chuckle echoed in my head, dripping with a bitter sort of…relief?

Then my mind went silent, but it didn’t matter now. I was awake.

I was alive.

My eyelids were glued shut. Or perhaps they were just too heavy? Too something… But I was tired of existing in the dark. I forced them open, sucking in a breath that didn’t hurt as much as I expected it to.

Why did I expect breathing to hurt?

Light stabbed at my eyes and memories flooded back in jagged pieces.

Chains, a blade, a face I wanted to forget. Kyros . My world narrowed to that one word, that single evil name, then snapped outward, leaving me dizzy with the question.

Where the hells am I?

I shot upright, my chest burning as I tried to take in air. My vision was still blurry, my heart thudding so hard the whole room seemed to move with it.

Instead of stone beneath my fingertips, it was silk sheets. Instead of the smell of blood and ancient earth, there was something familiar in a way that plucked at the faraway sensation of grief that had plagued the last…however long I had been out.

My chest tightened. Memories flashed through my mind in time with the rapid beat of my pulse, each one hitting like another blow. Kyros’ blade sliding down to bone, shackles rubbing my wrists raw, the scent of my own blood.

I glanced down at my arms, my fingers trailing lines where I could still remember the bite of steel. But there was nothing there but clean, smooth skin.

I blinked, my eyelids still heavy.

There were no stitch marks. No blackened scars. Nothing to prove the truth of the horrors my mind insisted had been done.

Was that a relief? It should have been. Didn’t I have plenty of scars? Still, the disconnect felt…jarring.

A thin, indignant squeak broke through my thoughts.

“Batty?” My voice was raspy with disuse.

Or from the screaming.

I finally lifted my gaze from my unblemished skin, searching the room frantically for signs of my skathryn. Light filtered in from high windows, framed by midnight curtains, while a giant frosted chandelier glittered like icicle glass above, and flames roared in the hearth.

I was back in the Winter Palace, in a room I had only seen once before.

Draven’s room.

Batty’s trill rang out again, closer to furious than I had ever heard her. I shot out of bed, ignoring the fatigue that still tugged at my limbs. There was a narrow door between the queen’s suites and these. Had Batty stayed in my rooms all this time?

I tried the handle, but it was frozen shut. I moved to the main door, but that handle wouldn’t budge either.

My heartbeat stuttered. If the rooms were similar to mine, the only other exit had at least one guard posted at it, and I had no hope that Draven hadn’t sealed it shut as well.

I was here, and alive, but I was trapped. Again.

Batty squeaked once more, and I finally saw the movement from the corner of my eye, where her tiny form flapped just outside the center window. I unlatched it, shoving against the frame.

It didn’t budge.

With a curse, I looked up to see that it, too, was completely iced over. I shoved harder, trying to quell down the panic rising in my chest.

My breaths came too fast, too short, and I clenched my hands into fists. My nails shifted into talons, biting into my skin while I forced another inhale.

Safe. You’re safe.

But was I? Alive and safe were not the same, and I had no idea what Draven wanted with me now.

My back rippled, and I shook my head frantically. I didn’t want to let my wings out, not when I was already trapped.

Just as I started to sink to my knees, a powerful wave of mana pulsated through the room. The door opened with a crash, shocking me upright. Then he strode into the room.

My husband.

My enemy.

The king who had slaughtered my people and saved my sister’s life. Who had rescued me from torture mere hours after inflicting that same unspeakable horror on someone I considered a friend.

He looked just as he had the last time I had seen him. His short silver-blond locks were faintly snowswept, falling carelessly across his brow. His aurora eyes burned the greener side of teal from a face that could have been carved out of marble by the Shard Mother herself.

The rings in his ears caught the midday sun, though his midnight outfit seemed to absorb the rest of the light in the room.

He was utterly composed, outwardly flawless, but his fury washed over me in a tidal wave intense enough to bring me to my knees.

I had forgotten, in the short time since I saw him last, just how potent his mana was, the menace that seeped from his very being. I had forgotten how it felt to be on the other side of his rage.

The door slammed shut behind him, frost coating the walls and sealing us both inside the frigid space. He looked between me and the unlatched window.

“So anxious to plunge toward your death, Morta Mea?” His voice was lower than I remembered it, and infinitely more dangerous.

I swallowed, straightening with all the dignity I could muster in my rumpled nightgown.

“No,” I opened my mouth to explain about Batty, but he cut me off.

“Of course not. I had almost forgotten that your kind don’t have to worry about that.” His lips twisted in disgust. “At least I wasn’t foolish enough to trust you this time, even with your own life.”

His hatred shouldn’t have been surprising. It sure as hell shouldn’t have hurt, but I sucked in a breath all the same.

“Yes, quick thinking on your part.” My voice was weaker than I meant it to be. “Do you keep many Skaldwing captives in your rooms, or do you usually just content yourself with torturing them?”

Draven’s eyes glowed. “Perhaps your memory fails you, but it was your own precious kind who kept you chained to stone. I never tortured you.”

I blinked and saw kind, determined features twisting in agony as the fragile membranes of his wings were ripped apart.

A blade on my skin. Ice through his bones. Both were unrelenting agony, inflicted with intention.

“No, not me.” I balled my hands into fists, willing my talons not to emerge. “But I saw what you did to Alaric.”

The temperature in the room dropped, and Draven advanced several steps forward. “If you mean the male who was spying in my kingdom, who helped kidnap my wife , then I hope you’ll forgive me when I fail to spare him a single moment’s remorse.”

A huff of air escaped me, though it might have been closer to a sob than a scoff. Zerina’s haunting scream echoed in my mind in time with the icy shattering of Alaric’s bones. Through it all, I could feel Draven in that moment, the way he had wanted the Unseelie to suffer.

“Don’t pretend you killed him for my sake,” I spat. “I felt how you enjoyed it.”

Another glacial wind swept through the room, and I suppressed a shiver, crossing my arms over my chest. He took another step forward, slow and deliberate.

“Whether it was for your sake or because of you, the result is the same.” His voice was even colder than this arctic room we stood in. “If you hadn’t been so attached to your secrets and your lies, I wouldn’t have had to torture your whereabouts out of the traitors hiding in my kingdom.”

The blood drained from my face as another meaning to his words landed.

“Wynnie?”

He scoffed as his mana pulsed again, frost crackling along the floor and up to the ceiling.

“Your sister is safe, or she was the last time I saw her, when I left her behind to stop you from dying at the hands of the people you’re so eager to defend from me.”

I let out a slow breath. Relief for my sister. Something else I couldn’t quite name.

Yes, he had saved me, but I was not foolish enough to believe that I was safe now. I could feel the hostility radiating from him, the same icy rage that had frozen an entire battlefield.

A heartbeat passed, then another, while I reminded myself that if he wanted to kill me, I’d be dead by now.

Not like this , his words came back to me, and I almost laughed. So, not without his permission. Or had I imagined all of that?

My feet pulled me toward him unbidden, a moth to a volatile flame. It was strange to remember the last time I had been this close to him, the way the air had been taut with an entirely different kind of tension.

Now, the only thing I felt from him was the resentment reflected in my own soul as we were forced to reconcile with the truth. I was an abomination , and he was a monster.

So why had he gone to such lengths to save me, and what in the forsaken hells did he plan to do with me now?

“If it was such an inconvenience for you, why did you bother?” I demanded.

The bond? The Heartstone? Something in me needed to hear him confirm it.

He clenched, then unclenched his fists, the motion shattering the frost that had formed over his ring. It was shimmering to the point of glowing, just like my own. The marriage bond thrummed between us, relishing in our proximity, utterly oblivious to all the ashes it had already left in our wake.

Abruptly, the air went still, an icy hush replacing the veritable blizzard that had been forming from the moment he walked into the room.

A bitter laugh escaped him. “Try though you might to escape it, you are bonded to me and to Winter. I won’t damn my entire court, not even for the sake of finally getting rid of you.”

I sucked in a breath, not at his confirmation of what I already suspected, but because he knew . Somehow, he knew that I had been looking for a way to break the bond.

Did he see it, the way I had seen him kill Alaric? Or had Nevara told him?

He left before I could ask, slamming the door and coating it in a thick layer of frost—sealing the room up like a tomb. Silent, cold, emptier than it should have been. I glanced at the window that was still frozen shut, but there was nothing else on the other side.

Batty was gone, and I was alone.