“Drink up. It works pretty fast, so you should feel your bond normally within a few seconds of drinking the whole glass.”
My nose scrunched at the slime-green liquid inside the cup. It smelled pleasant enough, but it looked like it tasted terrible. Zypher shifted his weight behind me, and I took a deep breath before upending the glass into my mouth. The flavor caused me to nearly drop it, minty and refreshing as it touched my tongue. With each swallow, my bond to Zypher became more vibrant. Just as Miles had said, the bond returned in full force within seconds of me setting the empty glass on the coffee table.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling at Miles. “I appreciate you helping me with not just this, but everything. You didn’t have to do any of it.”
Miles just shook his head. “That’s what friends are for, B.”
“Speaking of friends, we should probably find Shadrie and stop whatever she’s putting into motion. Daena really isn’t worth it.”
A growl rumbled in Zypher’s chest at my side. “On this, Dilectus, I do not agree. The ice mage is right in her actions. Had my concern not been with you and our muted bond in the moment, I would have sought out the fae prince myself. We are owed vengeance, and we shall have it.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Vallynn
I was hunched over the coffee table in my dorm, meticulously decoding the message that arrived from Linoran only an hour before, when Shadrie Nightshade stormed into the room. The door slammed against the wall, bouncing under the force of her rage as the petite ice mage stalked toward me, crystals forming under her feet as all the heat was sucked from the room.
“You,” she hissed, a finger jabbed in my direction.
Repositioning myself upright on the couch, I adopted my usual relaxed posture. “Hello, Shadrie. How nice to see you again.”
“Oh, fuck all the way off, Vallynn.” She snarled. “This isn’t a social call.”
“What is it then?” I asked, arching a brow at her.
“Your fucking fiancé is meddling with people’s mate bonds.” Her words were practically a growl as she stood in front of me. Her eyes promised violence, something I’d never seen in the mage in all the years I’d known her.
My lips tilted into a frown. “I find that unlikely,” I drawled. “Daena knows the consequences of meddling with mating bonds.”
Shadrie slammed her fists against her hips and scowled. “Tell that to Bechora and Zypher.”
My breath caught in my throat, and I forced myself to appear unaffected. “Explain,” I managed to grit out, waving my hand toward the recliner to indicate she take a seat.
Shadrie didn’t budge, staring at me with a glare thatpromised my death before she spoke. “Your betrothed,” she spat the word like poison. “Cornered Bechora with her gang of harpies, and one of them muted her bond to Zypher so he wouldn’t know they were attacking her.”
For the briefest flicker, my vision tunneled. The image of my mate cornered, hurt, stripped of the protection her demon mate provided, seared through my chest like a blade. My fists curled tight against my thighs, nails biting into my palms until the sting became sharp enough to anchor me. I wanted to storm across campus, tear Daena and her vapid entourage limb from limb, and remind them why my shadows were to be feared. But I couldn’t. Not without revealing what Bechora was to me and painting my father’s target firmly on her back.
I forced my lips into the arrogant, lazy smirk I’d perfected in my father’s court, the kind that hid everything I was truly feeling. “Muted?” I drawled, as though the thought didn’t make my stomach churn. “Sounds like a clever trick. Hardly anything to worry over.”
Shadrie’s ice magic spread, turning the condensation in the air into sharp crystals of ice. “You know it’s more than that, Vallynn. Zypher and Bechora have the right to take their revenge. It’s the way of our realm.”
I shrugged, deliberately slow, though I could hear the blood rushing in my ears. “It’s not that serious. They couldn’t actually break a mating bond, and reversing the magic that muted it is simple enough. I’m sure Zypher has already taken care of that.”
Her eyes narrowed into icy slits, the pale blue glow of her magic refracting off the walls like daggers. “Not that serious?” Her voice cracked like a whip. “You’ve changed, Vallynn. The boy I grew up with would never have brushed off something like this. Muting a bond is an egregious slight—it’s blood for blood, life for life. You know that.”
I leaned back further into the couch, feigning indifference though my heart thundered against my ribs. “You always were so dramatic, Shadrie. Couldn’t handle the jokes we played onyou as children, so you cried to your uncle and made them out to be worse than they were. If I lost my temper over every slight in this academy, I’d have no energy left for anything else. Daena’s little game doesn’t matter.” I paused, steeling myself for the next words. “Someone had to put the dud in her place—who better than her future queen?”
Shadrie’s scowl deepened, and frost cracked across the floor and over my shoes. “So, you’re not going to rescind your protection for the bitch, then? I should have known. The second that females started to notice you, you lost any hint of the honorable male you’d been. You’re as bad as your father.”
The words felt like a strike to the gut, bile threatening to climb up my throat. I swallowed down my instinct to prove Shadrie wrong, keeping my expression carved into my usual mask of bored detachment. “Honor is overrated,” I said smoothly. “Strength, however, is worth cultivating. My betrothed is simply doing her duty to the kingdom by culling the weakness here in the academy.”
Shadrie clenched her jaw, her teeth grinding until I thought they might crack. The air grew colder until my breath came out in white puffs. “You fucking disgust me,” she spat, her own breath fogging between us. “Even when I hated you and Dante for what you did to gain the attention of your fawning females, I thought you’d turn out better than your father. I should have known you’d let him twist you into a reflection of himself.”
Shadrie’s magic receded in a woosh as she spun on her heel and stormed toward the door. She slammed it behind her, shaking loose shards of ice from the ceiling. They scattered across my half-decoded message. The smirk melted from my face in the silence that followed, and my hands trembled faintly against my thighs. My shadows curled hungrily at my wrists, begging for release from the loose hold of the mental leash I kept them in check with. My eyes flicked to the coded message, a stark reminder of why I had to act against my own desires and play the role my father had cast me in. As much as I hated protecting Daena from the retaliation she deserved, Iknew I needed to use her actions to keep myself separate from Bechora. I couldn’t give in to the mate bond, not as long as my father sat on the throne. And definitely not before I stopped whatever wicked plot he was playing out against our people.
I drew a slow breath, forcing my shadows away, and lowered myself back into the rhythm of translating the coded message. I’d just finished decoding it when the door creaked open again, quieter this time, followed by the familiar cadence of Dante’s footsteps.
“Selir, the temperature in here is like a crypt,” he muttered. “What did you do, brood yourself into frostbite?”
