Even when they cost pieces of your soul.
CHAPTER 29
RETURN TO WAR
Kaan
The Queen'sportal deposits us back into reality with all the gentleness of being thrown from a moving horse. One moment we're standing in her chamber, the next we're stumbling through a gateway that tastes like ozone and fucking regret.
I steady myself instinctively, shadows flaring outward to check for threats. Always check for ambush. Always assume the worst. It's kept me alive for centuries and helped me take a throne that wasn't mine by birthright.
"Stay close," I tell Nesilhan, my shadows already reaching for her instinctively. Not a command—a need. After everything we've survived together, the thought of her more than an arm's length away makes something feral stir in my chest.
"Was that an order, Shadow Lord?"
"A request. From someone who's grown rather attached to keeping you alive."
"Romantic."
"I try."
She doesn't respond further. Just follows with Elçin at her side, the two of them moving with the synchronized grace of women who've survived together.
The silver binding-mark on Nesilhan's wrist pulses with unnatural light as she crosses the threshold, and I can't feel her anymore—can't sense the echo of emotion that used to flow between us like breathing. The Queen severed our bond. That connection lies dark and empty now, a constant reminder of what she destroyed.
Yasar follows, his steps measured and deliberate. He stays close enough to Nesilhan to satisfy whatever magic binds them, far enough that it might look like choice rather than compulsion. The pretense fools no one, least of all me. My shadows writhe, wanting nothing more than to wrap around his throat and squeeze until those unsettling eyes go dark.
But now is not the time. Now is never the time, apparently. I'm collecting grievances like a miser hoards gold.
Banu comes last, moving through the ruins. She pauses at the threshold, her wings trembling slightly as her gaze sweeps across what lies beyond.
Her expression goes from wary to devastated in the space of a heartbeat.
The throne room materializes around us as the Queen's portal collapses with a sound like thunder being strangled.
Devastation.
The word doesn't do it justice. Catastrophe feels closer. Apocalypse might be accurate.
The massive ebony pillars that once supported the vaulted ceiling—each one carved from a single piece of shadow-stone quarried from the deep places where light never reaches—lie shattered across the floor like the bones of murdered giants. Each pillar had taken a century to carve, enchanted by shadow-mages whose names are lost to time. Their destructionrepresents not just structural damage but the erasure of irreplaceable history.
Half the room has collapsed entirely, exposing the night sky above where a dome of shadow-glass once filtered the starlight into something softer, more tolerable. That dome had been a gift from my mother to my father on their wedding day—back before he became a monster, or perhaps when she still believed he could be saved from becoming one. Now it's just broken glass.
The sky visible through the shattered ceiling is wrong. Reality tears shimmer across it like scars, pulsing with sickly light that makes my shadows recoil instinctively. The fabric of the world itself is coming undone.
Ancient tapestries depicting Shadow Court history hang in tatters from the remaining walls, their threads unraveling like the realm itself. I can see fragments of the great battles—the War of Seven Nights, the Demon Purge, the Treaty of Twilight—all reduced to faded colors and disconnected images. Centuries of history, slowly being erased.
The marble floor, which once gleamed, is scorched with blast patterns I recognize all too well. The marks form concentric circles radiating from specific points—targeting patterns. This wasn't random destruction. Someone planned this. Someone calculated exactly where to strike for maximum structural damage while minimizing exposure to our defensive wards.
Light Court magic. Pure, destructive, and deliberately aimed at the support structures with the kind of destruction that speaks to inside knowledge.
Someone told them where to hit. Someone betrayed us.
Add it to the list of people who need killing.
"What the fuck happened here?" My voice echoes off broken stone.
Movement in the shadows near what's left of the eastern alcove. My darkness surges instinctively, coiling into deadlyspears aimed at the disturbance. The shadows respond to my fury, eager for violence, practically begging me to let them kill something.
