Page 188 of Sworn to the Shadow Throne

I tried my best to hide the way my heart was pounding—so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest. I composed my features, deliberately slowed my breaths, and desperately hoped the master performer looming above me hadn’t seen any of it. The dagger was close enough that even swallowing my regrets would be a mistake.

A tremor shuddered through the wall beside the corridor—not from below, like the last one. Fighting had reached the hallway.

Vaustin glanced toward the noise and smiled faintly, as though the chaos pleased him.

He leaned in, deliberately making his proximity a tangible reminder of exactly how much control he had and how little I did. Every instinct in me screamed to put distance between us, but the edge of the blade pressed to my throat was a constant reminder of all the things I couldn’t do each time I breathed.

“Give me the device,” he said to Coryanthus.

He pointed toward Berian’s body. “And do something about that. He will draw attention when our other guest arrives.”

Owain.

Coryanthus’s expression turned disgustingly smug as he reached into his doublet. He withdrew the chunk of obsidian and tossed it in a clean arc. Vaustin caught it with his free hand, nearly cutting my throat in the process.

I felt the rapid buildup of magic. Then Berian’s corpse,mouth open, eyes still staring in judgment, vanished. In its place stood a perfect simulacrum of a fur, so convincing that even I could not feel the illusion beneath it.

Behind me and without a word, the dagger smoothly transferred from Vaustin’s grasp to Coryanthus’s, its cold edge never moving a hair’s breadth away from my skin.

Where Vaustin had been coldly impersonal as he intimidated me, Coryanthus settled into position with a proprietary press of his body that made my jaw ache from clenching it. The way his arm wrapped around me wasn’t about holding me back—it was about declaring his ownership.

I stared straight ahead and refused to shudder, even as every inch of my skin recoiled and my stomach threatened revolt.

Vaustin lifted the device, turning it once in the firelight. He smiled at it as if it were his newborn babe, full of all his hopes and dreams. “Decades of work.” He drew in a slow breath. “Now we begin our push in earnest.”

I really didn’t like the sound of that last part.

Hurry Owain. But he was still fighting. I could feel it in the tremors beneath my feet.

A pulse of magic stirred from the obsidian. Then a sharp harmonic wrongness filled the room, like a breath sucked violently backward and all at once, but it kept going. When the device had been used on Berian, magic was ripped away. Now, more magic than I would’ve thought possible from something so small was flooding into Vaustin.

However many lives’ worth of magic, however many pieces of living, breathing souls it had torn out were becoming a part of the monster still holding me at knifepoint.

Berian was in there. Owain’s mother might be too.

Fire rose in my chest.

Vaustin lowered his hand and something off crossed his expression too fast to name. I prayed to the gods that it was regret, pain, or even doubt. Those would make him weak.

Then his gaze snapped past me toward the latch. A figure in white burst through it, slung on a tether of shadows. Thibault hit the stone floor with a thud and stayed there, crumpled and motionless. If the sound his body had made was any indication, he wouldn’t be getting back up.

Coryanthus shifted nervously behind me. But my heart nearly sang.

Owain’s shadows moved through the opening like the leading edge of a tide—dark tendrils sliding through every gap, flowing across stone. Seeing them, some of the tightness around my heart relaxed.

When he emerged, his eyes had gone entirely; no iris, no white, just black that caught the low light and gave nothing back. Shadows threaded up his neck and across his jaw, branching into the lines of his hands like living ink. His face mirrored his inner turmoil, with every subtle shift and twitch of the streaks proclaiming his fury for all to see.

My mate rose to his full height and went absolutely still when he saw me.

“Don’t move,” Coryanthus whispered, too close to my ear. “I like you exactly where you are.”

Beneath him was what he meant. His self-importance was directly proportional to the inferiority of those around him.

His grip shifted at my back, fractionally, and this time the dagger caught lightly on my neck. My heart skipped a beat with the sudden, sharp pain then resumed its erratic pounding.

Across the room, Owain flinched.

If he felt that, we’re not completely cut off from each other. Thank the gods.