Page 84 of The Shadow Orc's Bride

"Good," he said roughly. "I needed that hope to be true."

She swallowed, a sound too loud in the hush. "The seals?" She nodded at the cuffs. "If the light fails?—"

"If the light fails, these stop singing," he said. "And the thing down here stops listening to human songs." His mouth thinned. "You need to be away if that happens."

"I'm not leaving you."

"You should," he said. "For your sake. For theirs." A beat. "For mine."

"I'm not afraid of you," she said, and it was true. The fear that had haunted her in polite rooms had burned itself out on the walk through the hidden ways. Only heat remained, scalding and steady in her chest.

"You should be." His voice dropped, roughened, honest. "If you touch me again, the shadows will answer. They know you. They want to make you theirs because they think I am. I don't know if I can stop them. I don't know if I will want to."

She did not move her hand.

The shadows rose anyway—tentative, like breath in cold air. They curled around her fingers, cold first and then warm, as if borrowing the heat from her skin. A tremor moved through Rakhal, visible and contained, and the chain drew taut with the smallest ring.

"See?" he said, barely sound. "They remember you."

"Then remember me with them," she said. "Not as an enemy. As—" Her mouth refused ally; her heart disallowed beloved. She chose truth. "As the woman who came."

His throat worked. He bent his head closer without meaning to; the chain allowed an inch, no more. Even that inch changed the air. It thickened with a scent like rain on dry stone. The wardlight along the manacles dimmed to embers.

"Do you trust me?" she asked.

"I don't trust anything that breathes," he said, and then, softer, "I trust what you said."

She slid her palm from iron to skin, testing. Heat under her hand. A hard, urgent pulse. The shadows hissed—pleasure or warning, she could not tell—and then folded, docile, around both their wrists. Rakhal's breath shivered. The sound that left him was not a groan and not a laugh, but something chained between the two.

"Eliza," he said, her name like a vow he hadn't meant to speak.

The world contracted to the span of her hand on him, the trembling tether of chain between his arms, the soft, hungry movement of shadow. A fierce heat rose within her—desire tangled with danger, her body responding to the man she had tried not to want.

"Tell me how to help," she said, and her voice came out a little huskier than she intended.

"Stay," he said. "Stand where I can see you when it breaks."

"When what breaks?"

"The part of me that's good at being careful."

A sound carried then—distant at first, then nearer. Door. Voices. Boots on stone, precise and quick.

Eliza jerked her hand back. The shadows clung, reluctant, then thinned to a breath and slipped away. Rakhal's eyes darkened until they were bottomless again.

"They're coming," she said.

He bared his teeth. Not at her. At the door. At the world.

Eliza drew the hood lower and stepped back from the dais, fingers finding the hilt of the dagger under her cloak. The air shifted—sharp, metallic. The wardlines brightened in fitful pulses as if mustering what authority they had left.

The door burst open. Light and noise spilled in, washing over the walls.

Three mages stormed into the chamber. They froze when they saw her.

"The queen," one of them breathed. "By the gods?—"

The eldest, Master Yharen—a tall man with a silver beard and the self-satisfied air of someone who had long ago stopped fearing consequences—found his voice first. "So the rumours were true." His lip curled in disdain. "The mad queen has come to find her orc." He advanced a step, sneering. "As unhinged as they say."