CHAPTER THREE: THE BACKLASH (2)

Then the dark answered.

The Shadow Court didn’t have guards in this corridor. It had shadows. They came up off the walls like water rising, cold and rolling, and the three Light assassins didn’t even have time to scream. One moment they were glowing, golden, professional. The next, the dark folded around them the way a hand closes around a throat, and they were just — gone. Snuffed. The way a shadow snuffs a candle.

And standing in the middle of it all, breathing hard, amethyst eyes blazing with a fury I could feel through the bond like a fever — was Kaelen Thorne.

He looked at me. I looked at him. I was on the floor, bleeding, in a borrowed robe, having been caught escaping by the man I was supposed to be killing, while my own soul — traitor that it was — kept spiking with relief that he was alive.

“You,” he said. His voice was like winter breaking. “You tried to escape. And you walked into an ambush. And you’re hurt.” He stepped closer, knelt, and I flinched — and his hand, impossibly, went not for my throat but for the cut on my ribs, light as a held breath. “They were Light Court. Yours.”

“They were not mine,” I hissed, and I meant it, I meant it, but I could see the calculation cross his face anyway. Light blades. Light livery. His prisoner, in the dark, at the scene of the crime. The math wrote itself, and it wrote itself against me.

“You’re right,” he said slowly. “They weren’t yours. You were their target.” He tilted his head, and the glacier in his eyes cracked, just slightly, into something that looked almost like understanding. “Interesting. The Light Court sent an assassination squad to kill me — and accidentally tried to kill their own princess on the way.”

“He didn’t say their own princess,” I muttered. “He said ‘the Vail girl.’ That’s not ‘princess.’ That’s ‘asset.’”

Kaelen went very still.

“Asset,” he repeated.

“Ask them.” I nodded at the empty dark where his shadows had eaten three of our best. “Ask them what they were calling me. Ask them who sent them.” I laughed, and it came out ragged, because the cut on my ribs was throbbing in a way that had started to feel unfair — as if I’d been stabbed twice, once in the hall and once, somehow, through the bond. “Oh, that’s new. That’s—” I pressed my hand to my side, and frowned. “Why is this hurting twice as much as it should?”

He was watching me. His hand was still hovering, half an inch from my wound.

“Because,” he said, very quietly, “you’re not the only one who feels it, little bird.”

I opened my mouth to tell him exactly what I thought of that — a whole speech, actually, about how no one had asked my soul to make friends with the enemy, and if fate had a complaint it could take it up with my lawyer, who was also me — but the bond chose that moment to remind me it was listening. His pulse, close and steady, threaded through mine. Underneath the frost, I felt something I’d spent six years training not to feel: the careful, guarded relief of a man who’d come running in the dark and found me still breathing.

Traitorous. Both of us.

“Don’t,” I said, before I could think better of it.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do that.” I looked away, at the cold stone wall. “Don’t care whether I bleed. It makes the whole revenge thing awkward.”

Something moved in his face. A crack. “I don’t care, princess. I am inconvenienced by the fact that your knife wounds now arrive as couriered deliveries to my ribs. There is a difference.”

“Sure there is,” I said. “That’s why you ran three floors in the dark.”

“I ran three floors because a dead princess is a diplomatic incident.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Ian heard the alarm.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Ian,” he said, with the patience of a man addressing a very stubborn brick, “is standing right behind you.”

I turned. Sure enough, Ian was standing in the hallway doorway, armor and scowl and approximately zero sense of humor, holding a bundle of shadow-wrapped something that had once been three Light assassins. He looked at me. I looked at him.

“Allow me,” he said, hopeful. “She tried to escape. I could make it a very small one-stroke. Nobody would even notice.”

“She’s staying, Ian.”

“Your Majesty, she—”

“She’s. Staying.” The shadows at his feet rippled. Ian subsided, grumbling, the way a very loyal dog subsides when told not to eat the mail. I watched it happen and felt, against my will, something that was almost admiration. “Now. The infirmary.”

The infirmary of the Shadow Court smelled like frost and old linen. It was, against all my expectations, spotless. I’d expected torture racks. I’d expected decor. I’d expected vibes. Instead I got a healer who looked like a very tired raven, a cot of surprisingly comfortable stone, and Kaelen Thorne standing at the foot of my bed with his arms folded, watching his own ribs like they’d personally betrayed him.

Which, I reflected, was accurate.

“Explain,” I said.

“Explain what?”

“The part where you doubled over in your study because I got a scratch in a hallway.” I sat up, and the wound pulled, and through the bond I felt him flinch for me. “That’s not a thing. That’s not how people work. That’s a— that’s a soap opera thing.”