Behind me, he shifted.
His gloved hand came up slowly. Deliberately. He brushed the raven from my shoulder. The motion was almost gentle.
The bird took flight with an offended croak, black wings beating the chill air, circling overhead.
But it didn’t leave. It stayed close. Watching.
Waiting.
“The birds usually eat the dying.” His voice was mild, curious. There was no anger in it, no accusation. It was just a question wrapped in an observation.
“They do not greet. They do not welcome. They feed.” A pause. “Why do they court you, little bride?”
I needed a lie.
A good one. A believable one. Something that would explain the unexplainable, that would cover the truth with a story he might accept.
“Perhaps they mistake my silence for death.” I forced my voice to stay light. Careless. Bored, even.
“I’ve been told I’m unnervingly quiet. My aunt used to say I moved like a ghost through rooms.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. Mabyn had said that. Usually with disgust in her voice, right before she reminded me how much of a burden I was, how much my father’s fortune should have been hers.
Right before she slipped poison into my evening tea.
The Raven King didn’t respond.
His hand moved to the nape of my neck, warm and heavy against my skin.
It slid lower. Found the curve where shoulder met throat, that vulnerable hollow where the pulse beat strongest in living women.
His thumb pressed against my carotid artery, firm, deliberate, and held there.
Counting.
The petal gave him something to find. A rhythm. Fast and thready, irregular and wrong, but present.
I didn’t breathe. Couldn’t afford to, couldn’t risk the performance slipping.
One. Two. Three. Four.
He counted. I waited.
“Hmm.” He released me. Straightened behind me, his chest shifting against my back.
“A strange pulse you have. More like a vibration than a heartbeat. More like a hummingbird than a woman.”
“I’ve always been delicate.”
“Have you.”
It wasn’t a question. The words hung in the air between us, heavy with everything he wasn’t saying.
CADOR
The Black Keep rose from the mountainside like a dark, jagged scar.
My ancestors had built it a thousand years ago, in the decades after the Shift, when the world was still raw and bleeding and the monsters who survived were carving out territories from the corpse of human civilization.
