“There was somethingmissing,” she said, correcting him. Her hips rolling as she paced around him. Clinging to shadows and swells in a way that held him enthralled to her every circling step.
“Renegade,” he warned, and matched her step for step. Mindful of the slippery broken corpse still steaming in the grass. The wicked edge of curved horns only half as cutting as the look gleaming in her alien eyes.
“I have a king,” she murmured, and sank into a crouch. “The queen’s Authority, the one who wears my crown.”
Armor sliding without so much as an errant whisper, he mirrored her posture, planting both fists into the loam—and his knuckles sank into a pool of cooling gore.
“I named my general.” Her ears flicked back, but she grinned, watching from beneath her lashes. “The queen’s Eye, who sees where the path leads.”
“And now you want a Shade?” he drawled, and brought his feet beneath him. “The queen’s Shadow, who guards her back with a thunder of dragons.”
Gleaming eyes flashed green in the dark. “Ahh,” she breathed, and it was as if she’d been given a gift. “I thought I came for vengeance,” she said. “But instead I foundyou. Thriving in the wild beyond, in spite of the Anhur. And I now I know.”
He hummed, but that was all.
“Without a queen, they’re nothing at all. But a queen without a shadow cannot rule the feral court, because she’s already dead.” She flicked a quick lethal smile at him. “I mean to claim what I am owed, and I came bearing gifts.”
She lunged.
21
She was on him before he could dart clear of her toxic touch. Landing a playful blow that glanced off his armored shoulder, she bounded away and rolled into shadows, where she knew his eyes could not follow.
Not yet.
“Renegade,” he spat, ears flicked back, he flashed the point of his teeth—but only tucked in deeper. Dug in, he tried to track her with the slide of those honeyed eyes that could not truly see.
“Shade,” she hummed, ignoring the warning. Rolling his chosen name around in her mouth, just because she liked the taste.
He turned, keeping any weak spots tucked away. “I will not join you.”
“You reject what you do not understand.” Lunging, she struck anew, sending a bare foot lashing out at his ankle.
He caught her calf and tossed it away with a laugh. Cold, a bark of derision and hurt. “I reject a new queen! One infected by Anhur greed, playing gamesshe does not understand. How long?” he snarled, and shucked his bracers so she could see the swirling beauty of inked skin. “How long before you decide you can make me prettier? Before you tire of me, and trade my skills for a new set that suit your flighty moods?”
It was her turn to listen, and she did so without a blink or breath. Stalling their games, so he might vent this anguish for the wrongs done to him. To their people.
Wrongs that would never be allowed to happen again.
“I will not kneel, Renegade,” he said, voice trembling. “Not to you. Not ever again.” Tattooed cheeks flushing with glowing heat that made her itch to touch, he sneered.
Thumbing the tie that bound her cloak, she stood, straightening. “It can’t be coincidence,” she breathed, and slid her feet through the spongy loam of dewy grass. “Both of us here. Blooming in the dark we were born to rule.”
He scoffed. “Balkazar said much the same thing—right before he promised to breed me to one of our daughters. Is that why you’re here?” A scowl marred his beauty. Wild. Eyes rimmed in the brilliant, white-hot of seething hatred. A loathing, she knew, on some level, she had not earned. “Running errands for your masters?”
A snarl spattered over her lips. “Balkazar isnotmy creation.”
Shade exhaled a shuddering breath, his temper already cooling where vile words still hung in the air. “Is he dead, then?”
Clearing her throat, she inspected her cuticles for a beat, then said, “There aren’t words to describe what Balkazar has become,” before she turned. Pulling the ties and loosening her nightdress.
“Good.” Shade relented, pushing both hands through his hair, tugging on the blond velvet of twitching ears. “Good.A fitting end for that festering sack of sewage.”
Lifting one shoulder, Renegade shrugged. Content, for a moment, to let the stillness of the night carry away all that was toxic and cruel, for it was a thing she was deeply intimate with. The sludge of anger and fear that trauma left in its wake.
And then, “They’re smothering me. It doesn’t matter how hard they try, how deep their concern. They cannot feel… me. What they’re doing to me.”
“Youclaimedthem,” he reminded her.
