Page 18 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)

Draven

The door to my chambers slammed behind me, the echo cracking through the halls like a blade striking stone. I didn’t care who heard. Not my guards. Not my generals.

Perhaps I should have been more concerned with all of the whispers echoing through the palace halls in the days since I had returned. The curious or accusing stares, the not so subtle inquiries about my bride, their queen.

What would they think if they knew that she was their Unseelie Skaldwing queen? And worse yet, she was from the Shadow Clan. The one responsible for slaughtering their families. My mother. The one that led us into war in the first place.

I sealed the door with ice, and my wolves let out low whines of protest. Thalos and Lumen remained in the hall, the latter shooting me a look that could only be described as mutinous for refusing to allow him entry. The other three came with me.

My wife’s voice still rang through my head. I felt how you enjoyed it.

Ice spawned over the walls, cracking the tapestries and shattering the torches of faelight until the halls were drowned in shadows.

It was nothing new—her indignation in the face of the choices I was forced to make.

Choices she had forced me to make while she was hurling herself into danger, and my people along with her.

She could treat me like a monster all she wanted, but I wasn’t the one who had damned an entire court with my own cowardice.

It had been harder to stomach, seeing her stand in my palace the way she had before everything went to the hells, stubborn chin tipped up, her familiar scent invading every inch of my personal space.

What was I supposed to do with that? With her? With a bond that bound us tighter the more we fought against it?

I put my hand in my pocket, running it along the smooth surfaces of the amulet. Or locket, as I had discovered.

Whatever was in there had an energy even more chaotic than the Wilds, vast and dark, like it was meant to consume.

Maybe the female had helped in the woods, but I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that she was laying a larger trap. Whatever was in this amulet was dangerous. I didn’t trust it with my wife.

I didn’t trust my wife with anything.

That shards-forsaken bond had cursed me with more than her words.

It had shown me stolen moments between her and the sadistic male at a campfire.

It echoed their shared amusement, and their aim to sever our bond.

The way he sat too close, wrapping his wings around her like a shield.

And then, in the next breath, her terror.

His hands on her. His blade. Her screams.

I had felt it all. Through her. Through me. All of it festered like poison in my veins.

My knuckles cracked as I curled my fists, the sound splitting the silence like brittle ice. Frost splintered across the floor in jagged veins, climbing the stone walls until the halls groaned beneath the weight of it.

No, the kingdom could keep wondering about their queen. They could choke on their questions until I had my own answers. Until I knew what frost-damned fate the Shard Mother had twisted for us, whether it was a Shadow Queen on my throne or the desolation of Winter itself.

Now that she was awake— safe, the bond whispered — she was no longer my most pressing concern. While I spent a week chasing her all the way to the Wilds, my court had festered into deeper ruin, and that chaos would not wait.

The war room stank of parchment and ash, maps littered across the table like a battlefield of their own. Eryx looked up as I entered, relief flashing in his eyes, even if it was quickly buried under the iron mask of a Lord General.

“Where were we?” I asked flatly.

I hadn’t explained to him why I left when Everly awoke, her panic reaching me all the way through the palace.

Eyrx studied me, unease in the twitch of his jaw. It had been like this since I returned. I hadn’t told him why I needed to disappear occasionally, or where our healer was for the two days he spent healing my wife.

Hadn’t told him about her location now. Or about the way she nearly bled out on my bed, or even that she had been dragged to the Wilds in the first place.

And I sure as frozen hells hadn’t mentioned that those same Wilds were her former home. The future was too murky to know what I could or should reveal to my general just yet.

“I believe we were discussing the reconstruction efforts,” he said.

His voice carried no accusation, only the weight of too many nights spent burying bodies, and too many days protecting a people who were condemned to the same fate.

I nodded and stalked to the table, my gaze skimming the scattered reports, the red wax seals broken and smeared.

“The masons have already begun repairs on the western courtyard,” Eryx continued.

The words were stiff, as though practicality could patch over the carnage that had bled across my home while I was gone.

I was intimately familiar with death and her various forms, but even I grew tired of her. Of the constant call to the grave, and the way life seemed to be on her finale exhale in my court.

Too many soldiers had died in my absence. Not just soldiers, nobles, too. And villagers. All the weak and desperate who had sought sanctuary inside my gates. And their corpses had fed the frostbeasts that poured through when the wards shattered.

The air thickened, frost creeping along the edge of the table.

Eryx cleared his throat and I snapped my gaze up to meet his. His dark features pulled taut.

“What is it?” I demanded.

He hesitated, a fraction too long.

“It would have been far worse without the Visionary.”

It was as close as he would come to asking where she was. My jaw ached with the force of my teeth grinding together.

I had avoided thinking about her since my return. Her griffon would be slower with two riders, but she would be back soon, my wife’s sister in tow. Another complication.

Assuming they were safe. But they had to be. Nevara was strong and had her Shard Mother on her side. She would be fine.

“She’ll return tomorrow,” I told him after a beat. “And her companion needs to be hidden when she does.”

He narrowed his eyes, then nodded.

“Scouts report a horde of Wretches near Hailmarsh Valley,” he said finally.

The evenness of his tone was a little too careful. As though there was more he might have said but chose not to.

Still, I couldn’t dwell on that when monsters were flooding every corner of my kingdom.

Shards damn everything.

Hailmarsh lay in the heart of Winter, hemmed in by lakes that left it isolated and exposed.

It was honestly surprising that it had gone untouched for so long.

But if the Wretches breached those waters, they wouldn’t just take that valley; they would seep outward, spreading like rot through the Court’s core.

I stood, my chair scraping against the stone as it flew backward.

“I’ll take care of it.”

Eryx furrowed his brow, a muscle in his jaw going rigid. “Do you want reinforcements?”

“No.” My voice cracked like ice. “Fortify the palace. Keep the stonemasons working and double the patrols.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. I want to know why the hells we haven’t heard from our spies in the Wilds.” It took time to travel here, but that didn’t account for the complete and utter silence on that front since the day Everly had been taken.

He nodded, but he didn’t turn to go.

“What is it?” Impatience crackled in my tone, but my Lord General didn’t flinch.

“And the queen?” he asked, dry as winter grass.

Frosted hells.

He couldn’t resist, after all.

A muscle twitched in my jaw as I glared down at him.

He didn’t cower, didn’t push any further either. Instead he held my gaze in an unspoken acknowledgment.

He knew she was here. He just wanted me to know that he knew.

Bastard .

My ring flared as if it wanted me to answer him. Or perhaps it flared because it wanted me to return to her. Her crystal-blue eyes flashed in my mind, shadowed by thick navy lashes. The ring flared again, another tug of the ever-present chain that connected me to the liar in my bed.

I resisted its pull and forced the thought of her away. She was alive. For now. She was safe, but the kingdom was not. The frostbeasts were bleeding it dry.

Today, those monsters would learn fear. And they would learn it from me.