Ragged.
A voice, hoarse and angry, shouting something I couldn’t quite make out.
Then, right before the broom committed to the descent, the words cut clear through the bitter air.
“I SAID I’M NOT YOURS!”
Gideon.
Even shredded by exhaustion and fury, there was no mistaking that voice.
The broomstick trembled once, as if shivering.
I tightened my grip, heart pounding, eyes locked on the ugly little house carved into the hill.
Whatever waited inside those walls, chains, Wards, priestess-designed torture-puzzles, this was the place.
The link we needed.
The boy she’d made into a blade.
The missing piece that might still save or ruin us.
The broom angled toward the ground, finally, mercifully.
And I breathed, “Hold on, Gideon. I’m coming.”
Whether that was a threat, a promise, or both…
I hadn’t quite decided.
Chapter Thirty-Five
If Shadowick had a heart, I’d just flown straight into it.
From the air, the place had looked like a mean little stone house sunk into a hill—ugly, hard-edged, forgettable by design. The kind of building you don’t look at twice, because your instincts tell you it’s better not to remember it at all.
The moment my boots hit the ground, reality… shifted.
The modest, squat shape in front of me inhaled.
Not literally. There was no roof rising and no walls expanding, but thesenseof it, the magical overlay, drew in a long, quiet breath and exhaled its glamour.
The little house melted away.
In its place, something bigger unfolded.
The hill itself seemed to unroll, like a cloak being thrown back. Stone columns rose where bare rock had been, their surfaces carved with old sigils and scars. The roofline stretched, jagged points emerging like broken teeth against the dim sky. A tower I was absolutely certain hadn’t been there a second ago pushed upward, stopping short of any sensible height just so it could loom.
A mansion, or a castle, depending on how charitable you wanted to be, resolved in front of me.
It wasn’t grand in the shiny, palace sense. It wasn’t beautiful, exactly. But it was… darkly romantic in that “I eat hope for breakfast” way.
Gothic bones. Shadowick style.
The stone was a deep, near-black gray, the kind that drank light instead of reflecting it.
Ivy crawled up the walls in thick, ropey swathes, its leaves not green but a muted wine color, like blood gone old. High, narrow windows punctured the façade at irregular intervals, their glass almost opaque from this angle, some lit with the faintest glow from within—dull amber, sickly purple.
