1

The heels of my laced boots tap on the scuffed marble floor.

Arms hugged around my middle, I lean forward on the chair as though it will somehow help me hear better. But I’m right behind father and I don’t need to get any closer to hear his thunderous shouts.

“She never would have forfeited if she’d known the price!” Father’s accusatory finger aims at Daxeel. “This darkling,” he spits the slur with pure venom, “orchestrated her withdrawal—the fault rests with him!”

Daxeel just smirks.

Head bowed, inky hair falling into his face, his full lips twitch into a small, dark smile. The blink of his lashes is slow, calculating—but satisfied too, like he’s enjoying every bit of this, every second of panic, the taste of my tears in the air.

The watery glare I aim at him is followed by a snivel.

Leaning back against the bookshelves, Daxeel’s arms are folded over his muscular chest, boots crossed at the ankles, and the gleam of his cerulean eyes flickers to me.

The cruel victory in his dark smile doesn’t fade.

And neither do the faint shadows that crawl and curve over his shoulders. Thin wisps of darkness flick over the thick and barbed lines of the tattoo marking the side of his neck.

Still in his leathers, he’s smeared in streaks and patches of blood from the first passage. Crimson blood, black blood. Litalf and dokkalf.

My red, puffy eyes take him in like I’ve never seen him before, like this male is not the love of my life that I met under the moonlight in a garden of statues and tears. Rather, he is a stranger and a threat.

He is a threat.

Fooled me into a month of slavery, of dishonour upon my family with my defection of the first passage.

I turn my wet cheek to him.

The cloaked iilra moves around the desk. No sound comes from her steps, not a boot on marble or a scuff of the heel.

She floats, but in the way of a shadow, much like her creeping voice, “I myself saw your daughter sign the forfeiture.”

I scratch my thumbnail over the course, cheap wool of my sweater.

“You think this little thing—” Father throws his hand back in a gesture to me, and it’s a gesture the other iilra and the two scribes trace. “—knew what she was signing? You shoved parchment in her face when she was under the impression she was shielded by a bargain!”

I tuck myself smaller in the chair. One hand peels away from my crossed arms and lifts to my face. I bite at my fingernail, a horrid habit from when I was a child and Knife would chase me with watery fertilizer whenever he caught me doing it.

For the first time a long time, I chew on that thumbnail.

“Your daughter is of age. She signed as a second and failed to participate.” The iilra’s wispy voice carries centuries’ worth of weight to it. My toes curl in my boots at the sound. “Her slavery contract is final—and if she survives, she will be expected to compete in the final passage.”

So much honeywine pulses through me right now, it’s my blood and bones. I polished off two bottles before passing out in the bedchamber, then later awoke to Eamon telling me to get dressed for this—

Father fighting for my freedom.

Daxeel fighting for my enslavement.

And it’s all so upside-down that all I can do is keep to my subdued silence in the chair.

But that is the blow to my gut, the one that wrinkles my nose and puckers my mouth as fresh tears spill down my cheeks.

‘If she survives, she will be expected to compete in the final passage.’

‘If she survives…’

That’s the cause for the rinsing of my stomach, the writhing of my heart. Whatever Daxeel means for me in this month, I don’t know. He could command that I fall on his sword and I would be bound to his word. If I found strength enough to deny his order, he could kill me himself and face no consequences.

Of course, the evate bond is forged now and so he won’t kill me. He can’t. Yet I am not soothed by that, not in the least.

I feel more in danger around him than ever before, like he’s in on the ultimate secret and I’m just stumbling around in the dark.

I avoid his unflinching stare burning into my face.

Father steps forward, closer to the iilra who I’m certain is preparing to leave this mundane business, because that’s all my life is to her, mundane.

“There must be a way,” father says. “There must be a way to spare her. My daughter will do best as a wife, not as a warrior or a slave.”

Daxeel lifts his gaze to my father. His smirk widens into a small smile, and the sight of it has my teeth clamping down hard on my thumb. The blood from the glass he earlier spat out, it stains his lips and his teeth, smeared black and red—

My chest burns a sudden sickly sensation.

Daxeel’s bloody smile is aimed at my father. “Buy her.”

An icy chill runs down my spine all the way to my curling toes.

Daxeel doesn’t so much as glance at me, and neither does father. Their stares are locked like hooks.

Daxeel’s smile widens but turns into more of a bared teeth look than anything hued with victory.

This.

This is a challenge.

A statement.

And he directs it right at my father.

“Buy her,” Dax echoes his words with more bite. “That’s her purpose, is it not? To be bought and sold and traded. So buy her contract.”

Father falters.

The ugly red of his face is turning purple as he falls back his weight onto one leg. A slight, minimal gesture of retreat. Because we know, everyone in this office knows, we have no gold.

“I’m not unfair. You may have her for the price you deem worthy.” Daxeel’s snarled mouth relaxes a little as he throws his gaze to me. “Ten thousand gold pieces.”

The exact amount of my tocher.

My lashes shut on fresh tears.

All that separation of my mind and soul from my body—it’s gone, just like that. The realisation of it comes crashing down on me like piles of stone. I feel everything, and it chokes me with a raspy sob.

I bury my twisted face in the quake of my hands.

Daxeel meant for me to be in his home, under his control, for the next month. This is nothing to do with his desire for me, but everything to do with whatever scheme he has at play, a scheme much larger than any I’ve cooked up.

I only thought of him, myself, Taroh—small and slight futures, irrelevant and totally insignificant in the face of the Cursed Shadows, the truest form of darkness to exist.

Daxeel thought bigger, he schemed on a larger scale.

And I, the fool, thought I was keeping up.

Silly me.