Page 172 of The Queen’s Shadow

When I got my powers back, I was going to skin that asshole alive and make myself a douchebag-panther fur coat. What a fucking dick.

I stared at the closed door, absolutely fuming. Who did he think he was? Ordering me around and acting like he basically owned me.

No one owned me. I was free and that was how it was going to stay. I held my hand up and pointed my index and middle finger at his bag. Closing my eyes, I willed a quasar to form at the tips of my fingers. I was going to blast the shit out of his bag and burn all his crap until there was nothing left. The thought of what I was sure was a bag full of white t-shirts and shredded jeans burning to a crisp caused a small smile to curl my mouth. I could do this. I just needed to focus. It was as easy as breathing. I knew I could do it if I just cleared my head.

As the thoughts bled from my mind, I fell into the calm state I needed to enter to wield my magick. However, instead of the usual cool silence that washed through me, I was suddenly plagued with memories.

The unforgiving electric shock of the slavery bond cut into my aura as I fought against impossibly strong hands that held me down by my wrists. Hot whispers to ‘stay still’ crawled over my ears, the words scuttling across my skin like cockroaches. Male laughter followed by the press of fingers and tongues in places that hurt. The cruel sting of humiliation and shame that burned through me, as I failed again and again to fight back.

My eyes flew open, and I fell, gasping to my knees. My hands were shaking and barren. I stared down at my palms, tears stinging at the backs of my eyes. Without my magick what use was I? I was helpless, and a liability. No wonder Raven had sent me away.

Shame and guilt washed over me. I felt empty and worthless and weak. This hadn’t happened the last time, and I had been a slave for so much longer then. I think, because I had been sold into Ash Nevra’s court at such a young age, I hadn’t really known any better at the time, and I hadn’t fought as hard. After having spent over ninety years with Amon and Dossidian, learning what life should have been like, going back into slavery had felt like my very soul had been torn from my body.

I had truly thought I would be trapped again for eternity. I had believed them, when they told me that everyone was dead. I hadn’t believed that anyone was coming for me this time, and I had fought so hard to try and free myself because what else could I do? If no one was coming for me, I needed to get myself out, but I hadn’t been able to.

No matter how hard I resisted and fought back, those daemons made me change into what they wanted me to be and forced me to act out their darkest fantasies with them.

Over and over again.

The daemon Rycon had killed when he found me wasn’t the first daemon to force me to change into a child. It had happened so frequently that I had found myself getting stuck in that form. Meredith said it was because I fought so hard that I damaged my shifting magick. Once I got stuck in the shape of a child, it almost became a selling feature, and the brothel’s madame sent more and more daemons with a taste for children to my room.

My stomach rolled and I bit back bile as the memories continued to plague me.

Sick fuckers.

When Rycon had blown open the door, and I realized it was him… it felt like seeing sunshine for the first time after being locked in a dark cave for months.

It had taken me a moment to process that it was him, and that he had found me. There had been one long second, when he had looked at me, and I had wondered if he was really there, or if it was some sort of cruel joke. But no, it had been him. He had been real.

He had come for me.

More than that, he did what I hadn’t managed to do, and slaughtered the fucking asshole who had been about to rape me. He had done it with so much rage and violence, that it had almost felt personal.

I didn’t remember much else after he killed that daemon. I must have gone into shock. My memories of Rycon carrying me out of the brothel were patchy, and they got even more faded once we made it back to The Court of Pride. One thing I did remember, was the snapping feeling in my chest as he wrapped his arms around me and cradled me into him. He smelled like the rainforest, and I had never felt more safe than I had in that moment.

Some deep, instinctual part of me knew that he would protect me, and that I could finally rest.

Then he had to open his big idiot mouth and ruin everything. Him and Raven. I couldn’t believe she took his side, and they conspired with each other to make my decisions for me. I couldn’t stand feeling like I didn’t have a choice. Especially after what I had just been through. I had spent weeks with literally zero free will. To come back home to my friends and be treated like a child with no say in anything was so triggering it made me want to punch them both in their stupid faces.

Then to make things worse, Rycon humiliated me and made me look weak infront of everyone. Now everyone knew I was useless. The shame and embarrassment I had felt in that moment had been so overwhelming that I wanted to run from the room. I still couldn’t believe he did that to me. Then he had the nerve to ask me why I was pissed off and didn’t even have the decency to apologize.

The audacity!

I pushed myself up off the ground, scowling at his bag, which was still very much intact. Maybe I couldn’t melt his shit, but I could still throw it out the window. Guess I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

I went to grab the large bag and frowned at how heavy it was. I unzipped the duffle and peered inside, surprised to find that there weren’t even any clothes in it. It was all cardboard boxes of what looked like ammo.

I rifled through the rest of the items and found that the side pockets were stuffed with little bottles of hemoglo, which didn’t make a ton of sense. What was a shifter doing with hemoglo? They healed so fast they barely ever bothered with magickal potions… weird.

My fingers closed around another bottle, and I pulled it out to examine it. My heart skipped a beat when I recognized it. It was one of the souvenir bottles I always made after visiting a new place. This was the one I had made after we had first returned from Olkuyrbe.

I ran my thumb over the label. The little black heart I had sketched was smudged now, as if he had rubbed his own thumb over it in a similar fashion countless times.

Why did he have this?

I didn’t understand why he would be carrying this around with him. I shoved it back into the bag and scoffed, as if the duffle bag full of ammo were to blame for all my problems. I glanced back at the closed door and debated tracking him down and demanding he tell me why he had taken that little jar of soil from my room. The more I thought about it, the more I decided against it.

‘I’ll sleep wherever the fuck I want, Kasha.’