I pull out abruptly, my shadows lashing violently around the room. Vases shatter. Papers scatter. The temperature drops until frost forms on the windows.
"Get out," I command, refusing to meet her eyes because I know what I'll see there—questions I can never answer.
She turns slowly, confusion and hurt evident. "Malakai?—"
"I SAID GET OUT!" I roar, shadows exploding outward with enough force to crack the stone floor.
She doesn't need to be told a third time. Without another word, she flees, the door slamming behind her.
I sink to my knees amid the destruction, my shadows writhing violently as I struggle to regain control. My fangs still ache with the need to bite a mate I can never have again.
Two hundred years of carefully maintained barriers, shattered by a single moment of weakness with a woman who was never supposed to matter this much. A woman who makes me feel things I swore died with Julia.
And now Seraphina knows a name she was never meant to hear—a name I haven't spoken aloud since the day I buried my heart alongside the only Omega I ever loved.
But the bond with Seraphina pulls at me even now, incomplete and aching, feeling dangerously similar to what I had with Julia.
The third truth can wait. Right now, I have my own ghosts to contend with—ghosts I thought I'd successfully buried beneath centuries of calculated cruelty.
But some wounds never truly heal. Some loves never truly die.
Julia.
The name echoes in my empty chambers, a ghost that refuses to stay buried.
And somewhere in the palace, Seraphina runs, carrying the weight of a dead woman's name and questions I'll never be able to answer.
CHAPTER 19
BLINDFOLDED SURRENDER
SERAPHINA
I slam the door to my chambers hard enough to rattle the hinges, my whole body trembling with fury and unsatisfied Omega need. After weeks of marriage, I thought I was beginning to understand him, but the memory of Malakai's face—the shock, the horror when he'd whispered that name, burns in my mind like a brand.
Julia.
Who is she? The question beats against my skull with each frantic heartbeat. I pace the perimeter of my room like a caged animal, light magic crackling at my fingertips in dangerous little sparks. The golden energy reflects off the polished marble walls, casting erratic shadows that dance with my agitation.
My body is in revolt. The interrupted mating has triggered something dangerous—a low-grade fever that marks the beginning stages of an emergency heat. Cramping radiates through my lower abdomen in waves, my Omega body prepared for a knot that never came. My scent gland throbs with a painful, swollen ache—it had been preparing for a bite, for Alpha fangs to pierce and claim, and the denial burns like a physical wound.
Worst of all, the slick won't stop. My body continues producing it in steady, humiliating excess, still trying to complete what started. I can feel it coating my thighs, soaking through my undergarments, my biology refusing to accept that the mating was interrupted.
In the corner of my chambers—the corner I've been pointedly ignoring—sits the evidence of my biological betrayal. Sometime in the past week, while I wasn't paying attention, I constructed a nest.
It started small. A few extra pillows. The softest blanket from the bed. But now... now it's grown into something that makes my face burn with humiliation every time I look at it.
Silks stolen from the linen stores. Cushions liberated from every sitting room I've passed. And buried at the heart of it all, items I don't remember taking but that carry his scent so strongly I can smell them from across the room—a shirt left draped over a chair in his study, a cloak abandoned after a training session, a blanket that somehow found its way from his chambers to mine.
My Omega has been gathering nesting materials like a creature possessed, preparing a space for mating, for heat, for?—
I can't even finish the thought.
The worst part? Every time I try to dismantle it, I find myself adding to it instead. My hands move without permission, tucking and arranging, making everything softer, more comfortable, more saturated with his scent.
I hate it.
I hate that it's the only place I've been able to sleep properly since arriving at the Shadow Court.
