Shadow Cursed by May Sage Page 0,41

trade enough goods and favors to repair a roof.

Nevlaria Bane, crown heir of Tenebris, cannot afford the weakness that a mate provides.

I'm too dangerous, too volatile where his safety is concerned already. I haven't forgotten what it felt like to let myself take, and take and take, absorbing the life force of immortals, fully intending to consume them. And I haven't forgotten that it was seeing him in pain that triggered it.

"Do you need to see your family before we leave tomorrow?"

He inclines his head. "I'll go tomorrow. They're likely to be asleep already."

It's almost morning already. "You're sure you don't want any more food? It's delicious." He emptied a generous plate a while back, but he's just watched me eat for the last…I don't know how long. I've eaten for hours, and I feel no regret.

"Only one of us starved for years, you know."

I didn't actually starve; my system was on complete lockdown, frozen in time. It doesn't change the fact that my stomach has never been this empty—not even after gorging myself on fairy fruit and throwing it all up in the garden as a kid.

And now, it's never been so full. Our kind never needs to eat as much as I have tonight.

I manage to get to my feet and drag myself to my bed. I wince, hating the very sight of it. And the smell of it, too. The inside was stuffed with lavender, I think. I want to burn it to ashes. Tomorrow. As much as I dislike the idea of ever sleeping again, I am growing tired, and I can't afford to leave Whitecroft without all my wits at my disposition.

I drag the covers over my shoulders, closing my eyes. "Do you intend to stand there the entire day?"

"If it pleases you, princess."

I roll my eyes. Princess. When he used to call me that, I was anything but. Now, it's accurate, yet it still feels like a joke. "There's plenty of room in this bed."

I keep my eyes closed as he joins me. Feeling the warm, hard body against me, and smelling his heady scent, I decide I don't quite hate my bed after all.

A cloud of dark fur leaps on my feet, and I laugh. “Where were you all day?” I ask the fox, who fixes me with a challenging stare.

He seems to say, I don’t see how that’s any of your concern, and I decide he’s not wrong. Being my familiar doesn’t make him a pet. The wyrfox is as wild as he ever was. I wonder how he’s taken to living in the castle, making a silk bed his den. From the way he starts to snore moments later, I guess he’s adapted to it quite well.

I follow him into a deep slumber.

Dusk comes too soon, and with it, the buzz of activity I've heard every day for ten long years. At first, I don't move, used as I am to not being able to. But when I feel Drusk shift next to me, I open my eyes and sit up.

Sometime in the night, he must have removed layer after layer of clothes, because all I see is delicious, warm, bare skin, covered in dark ink. I gasp, enjoying the way his defined muscles flex. The marks on his back tell a story I don't know—a story of loss and friendship. My fingers trace them.

He shivers under my touch and awakens with a start. His unfocused eyes freeze when they fall on me. Then he breaks into the most open smile I've ever seen on his lips.

I could lick it. I certainly want to.

To distract myself, I ask, "When did these show up?"

He glances over his shoulder to his back. "Some, a while back, during training. I made friends with a boy who gave up the first week. When he left, I earned my first mourning mark." He reaches around his waist to touch a rose with blue lines, right over his hipbone.

"Were you lovers?" I ask, curious, I tell myself. Not jealous. I have never been the jealous type, and that won't start today.

It won't.

"Of a sort. I hadn't touched him, but we understood each other, he and I. More than anyone at the camp. When he left, I was truly alone. I learned later that he was called back to the sea. He's half mer."

That explains it. The sea folk aren't often welcoming to outsiders—and they do tend to consider half-bloods as such—but if he was asked to go