Page 55 of Taken By Shadows

“Lemon fondant cakes. They’re my favourite,” she explained as she popped a whole one into her mouth, her lips struggling to keep the crumbs from going everywhere. “My friend Ashen introduced me to them.” She extended the selection to me, and I pinched one off the plate.

They were good. And I was hungry.

As I chewed, a silence stretched out between us like a bolt of fabric tumbling away. Audrie was looking at me through doe-eyed lashes.

“So, what do you remember?”

“Not much,” I lied. The exact colour of my own blood on the dark stone mixing with the puddles of seawater, hung as vividly in my mind as an oil painting.

“Is it still sore?”

She must have known I had been injured but didn’t know the details.

“No. I just—I don’t want to talk about it. I can remember the pain, but it’s gone.” I picked at the cake and mulled it over, wondering why she wanted to know more about it all.

She’d stopped eating, though, and was looking at me as her lips twitched.

A little strained, I sighed. “Audrie. What is it?”

“It was only … It’s just, today … three men. They were attacked. It was at the docks,” she said, picking at another cake.

I blanched.

Three men.

I didn’t need to ask who did it. I knew the answer to that in my heart.

“Men?” I tried to act surprised. I didn’t know why I was lying to her. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit to my part in all of this.

Audrie nodded. “Three of them.” She stalled and swallowed. “Why were you out there all alone?”

A cord of tension pulled in my gut.

“Kaedian. Lord Kaedian,” she corrected.

I waved a hand as if to say Forget his damn title.

“He found you … I don’t know what happened, but Gavrin … He was raging this morning as he left Lord Kaedian’s study. He told me afterwards.”

I needn’t have bothered lying to her then. Shame rose up in my throat like bile.

She faltered and I took her hand. Her hazel eyes shifted with the memory of whatever Gavrin had detailed.

“He’s …” I fumbled for words. I wasn’t sure Audrie was the right person to ask, but I had tried asking Kaed directly about why people cowered before him. Maybe they just instinctively knew to shy away from a dangerous animal. “His magic. He’s powerful? More than most?” I knew the truth of it as I said it. The unmistakable taste of power dripped from Kaed when he so much as entered a room. It rolled off him like storm clouds rolling over hills and smothering valleys. I recalled the first time I’d really noticed his fae being after he’d flown me away from the meadow. The elemental and aethereal power that sang deep within him. It was more of a chant, a hymn to the forgotten gods. Ancient and unknowable.

Audrie nodded and sniffled. She was visibly shaken by the event. And that was the normal response.

She didn’t elaborate, and I couldn’t push her.

For having just been attacked, I was surprisingly fine. And perhaps, a little bolstered by the knowledge that those men were in a worse state than I was.

Resolve took root inside me; it steadied me. I was done paying the price for everyone else’s terrible morals. Everyone I’d come up against recently had wanted something from me. I was done.

I might not know who I was or meant to be, but I wasn’t anyone’s victim.

But Audrie should never have had to know about this. Because of me. I didn’t know how to fix what she had learned. To scrub it from her mind. She was so full of fire and adorable chaos, and she never should have had to be exposed to something like that.

“This is my fault.”