Page 88 of The Shadow Orc's Bride

He thought about it, very briefly and without shame. He thought about her weight, the way she had fit against him as if they had done this before. The shadows, encouraging devils, put memory-heat in the place where the body remembered best.

"Walk," he said, and made the word gentle by accident.

She went first, folding herself through the narrow opening, cloak snagging once on a nail. He tugged it free with careful fingers, then followed. The crawlspace flattened their breath. Stone rasped his shoulders; water whispered somewhere above his head.

When they spilled out onto the water stairs, the sound opened into a low thunder. The steps were slick and shallow, worn by centuries of feet and the slow spill from a pipe that had never found a better job. Through the far arch he could see a paler dark—the not-quite-night that lived beneath the city's skin.

Behind them, very far away and all at once, the dungeon let go.

The sound came like the end of a story: one long groan that broke into a dozen cracking cries. Wind rushed up the corridors. The stairs shuddered under his boots. He set a hand to the wall and waited while grit rattled like rain.

Eliza's fingers found his without looking.

They stood together—man, queen, and shadow—as the stones groaned and settled. When quiet came back, it was a different quiet. A clean one. A quiet that had closed a door.

The shadows withdrew reluctantly, lingering at the edge of his mind like a sated, sulking beast. For the first time in days he realized his head did not ring with other voices. The dead were there, patient as weather, but they were not pressing. The relief made him sway.

"Rakhal?" she said quickly.

"I'm here," he answered, surprised to hear that it was true.

He looked at her, then, because not looking had become harder than the other thing. Her mouth was parted just enough to show breath, her pulse a quick bird at her throat. He remembered the press of his forehead to hers in the vault. He remembered the way the shadows had folded around their wrists.

"We go," he said, the decision already iron in his chest. "Not into the city. It will burn before dawn."

"Then where?"

"Out," he said. "We find Shazi—she'll be waiting on the plain beyond the walls. Then we ride for the forest."

"The Varak woods?" she asked. "Even your kind avoid them."

"Not the Varak." His mouth curved, a ghost of something like memory. "Deeper. Where the light dies before it touches the ground. I know that place better than any living thing. Better than I should. It will hide us."

Eliza's breath caught, the sound small and quick. "You have a refuge there."

He nodded. "A place Azfar made me build when he thought I'd be hunted one day. A place that remembers my scent and my blood. The forest itself won't harm us while we stay under its vow."

"And when the vow ends?"

"Then we'll be ready," he said. "We'll recover, plan, decide how this ends."

She held his gaze for a long moment, searching. Whatever she found there made her nod, slow and deliberate. "Then we go."

He turned toward the pale slit of the arch. The night beyond it waited—cold and vast and full of rain. Behind them, the ruin of Maidan breathed its last. Ahead, the forest called to the part of him that had never stopped being wild.

He reached back once, caught her hand, and together they stepped out into the dark that would hide them both.

Chapter

Forty-Five

Rain and ruin filled the cold, sharp night.

They stood just beyond the shattered archway where the small side door hung half open, the city sprawling below in a bruised haze. Fires flickered where the wards had failed; faint horns carried through the wind.

Rakhal turned toward her. His eyes were not black now but something worse—dark, alive, shifting like the space between flame and smoke.

"I'll hide us," he said softly. His voice had changed. Deeper, rougher. The words trembled with restrained power.