Chapter 6
Irun.
The horrible walls of this horrible castle melt together as my heels pummel the mossy floor.
I skid around one corner, then another, my legs screaming as I put distance between myself and that debaucherous dinner. Acid scorches up my throat, but I welcome the burn. Maybe it will scorch away the memory etched onto my eyelids. The sin seared into my soul.
Because I never should have seen that. I shouldn’t bear witness to anyone’s private passions—not when I’ve resolved to die a priestess, intact and pure, my hair so long it brushes the floor.
I can’t even conceive of a man’s…part…inside me, anyway, not after what I just saw. The size of it, the sheer invasiveness—
My legs shriek as I push myself harder. I need to outrun these thoughts, this poison clouding my bloodstream.
I round another corner at a dead sprint. Fae cry out as I knock them from my path, but I don’t care. My mind will empty if I just keep going. If I run until my body burns to ash.
I give myself to the flight, letting the fire in my lungs scorch away the memory of that dinner. My body cries for mercy, but I don’t relent. I won’t go back to that dining room. Ever. I’d rather starve.
Up ahead, the corridor branches, and I pelt past at full tilt. A fae woman vaults from my path as I streak by.
She calls out to me, but the words are lost amid my pounding heartbeats and the desperate breaths wracking my lungs. I barrel onward as the hall slopes down and down and down and…
Oh. Oh, goddess.
My feet skate out from underneath me, the angle of the corridor pitching me forward. I go tumbling down the incline, my skirts pinwheeling, pain erupting along my side. Not even the moss underfoot can cushion me as I plummet end over end.
Then I see it. A great, yawning hole, up ahead. Because this corridor just…ends. Not with a solid wall, but with the emptiness of dark sky and white stars.
I’m about to go hurtling into space. Falling into that stupid courtyard that isn’t a courtyard at all.
Panic explodes inside me as I grab for the walls.
My nails snag on a tree root, but it rips through my grip, taking a layer of skin with it.
A scream shreds my throat, but that doesn’t help.
Nothing does. I grapple for another root and miss.
Meanwhile, the sky zooms closer, the tunnel’s end like a wide, dark mouth, preparing to swallow me whole.
Then a thundering bellow pierces my awareness. It arrives from a distance, but its tenor is like a shockwave aimed at my heart. And I know. I just know it’s the Shadow, roaring his fury, his anger ricocheting off the walls as I careen past.
“I’m here!” I scream as I fall. “Help!”
He roars again, closer this time, but every passing second adds to my momentum. My knee bashes against my temple as I somersault out of control.
Still, I try. I scrabble at whatever I can reach, my nails slicing uselessly through the moss, my pendant whipping against my face. Another bellow fills my ears, but the Shadow won’t reach me in time.
I squeeze my eyes shut. Flashes bloom behind my eyelids, pieces of a life cut far too short.
I see Brynne laughing, the summer she taught me how to swim.
My father showing me how to pray, his hand warm on my head as he gave his approval.
A gap-toothed Evelyn, sneaking me a piece of honeycomb while begging me not to tell.
And later, white light bathing our breakfast table.
Carina’s joyful squeal. My father glancing to me while something died in his eyes.
Then Carina, bringing me flowers the next day—a kindness that felt more like pity—and me, twelve years old, alone in the corridor while the sounds of my little sister’s Gracing celebration echoed in the dining room.
Then my father’s voice, just hours ago, cold and unfeeling. You’re late.
And suddenly, I’m falling.
The corridor drops away beneath me. Wind screams past my ears. The stars rush up, close enough to touch as I hurtle into the abyss.
A massive hand clamps around my wrist.
The momentum wrenches my shoulder, a white-hot bolt of agony ripping a scream from my chest. But I jerk to a stop, swaying in the void like a pendulum.
The Shadow's face appears over the lip of the tunnel, his eyes wild, his white hair whipping in the wind. His fangs are on full display, his clawed hand locked around my wrist. With a growl that reverberates through my bones, he hauls me upward.
My battered body scrapes against the moss as he drags me away from the edge. The moment I clear the drop, he yanks me against his chest, one arm banded around my waist.
“I've got you,” he rumbles, his voice shaking with anger or relief or some blend of the two. “You’re safe.”
I hear him, but I can’t understand, not really. Terror still crests inside me, wave after wave, and my lungs won’t reinflate, won’t—
A sob wrenches free, then another. Somewhere within me, a dam breaks, and suddenly I’m weeping, great heaving gasps that shake my foundation.
“Oh, Princess.” The Shadow exhales roughly, his breath warm in my hair. “Sariah. Don’t worry. You’re safe.”
Goddess, I want that to be true. So very, very badly. But it isn’t.
“I don’t want to be here,” I choke out between sobs. “I don’t want any of this.”
The Shadow’s arms tighten around me.
“I just want— I want—” I dissolve into another wave of tears as everything crashes in at once—Amriel, the Claiming, the dinner, that fall. This strange, terrible world where nothing makes sense and everything is wrong.
“To go home?” the Shadow says carefully.
“Yes,” I wail. “I want to go home.”
He holds me as I cry, stroking my hair, his claws tangling in my curls.
His chest rises and falls beneath my cheek, and despite everything—despite the fact that he’s a heathen, that he wants impossible things from me—I can’t help but sink into his embrace.
I’m raw, broken, stripped of all my defenses, and I cling to him as if he’s the only solid thing in existence.
I don’t know how long we stay like that, but it’s long enough for my sobs to dwindle and my breathing to even out. Long enough for humiliation to creep in, hot and acidic.
I pull back, swiping at my face with shaking hands. “What is this place, anyway? How can you have something so dangerous here? A corridor that just…ends?”
He looks at me askance. “It’s a refuse tunnel. We dump our trash down it.”
The explanation lands in my ears and sits there. Then, as quickly as the tears took root, laughter does. It boils out of me, violent and unstoppable.
Ishanna’s blood, I almost died. Falling down a goddess-damned garbage chute.
Nothing about it is funny, but I’m hysterical now, unable to rein in the billows of laughter pouring from my lungs. Or maybe I’m crying again. Who can tell.
“I think you should get some sleep, Princess.” The Shadow shifts, sliding a massive arm beneath my knees. “I’ll take you to your room.”
“No,” I manage between sob-gasps, but he's already lifting me. “I can walk on my own.”
“You can’t even stand,” he counters, and it’s true. My legs tremble, spent from my run and that fall and the bone-deep wrongness dragging at my soul.
So…I give up. My laughter peters out, and I don’t fight.
Instead, I lay my head on the Shadow’s shoulder and let him carry me through the winding corridors, marveling at the absurdity of it all.
Because if someone had told me this morning that I’d end my day in the embrace of a goblin—willingly, no less—I would’ve laughed.
I would’ve told them, with absolute certainty, that they had lost their mind.
But here I am, being carried to bed by a monster. A demanding, heathen fae who just saved my life and wants to keep me forever.
My fist curls against the Shadow’s breastplate. His grip reflexively tightens, and even though I tell myself to shrink from the presumptuousness of his touch, I don’t.
Instead, I say, “Thank you. For saving me.”
He grunts. I feel the vibration in the center of my palm. In my soul.
“It was nothing,” he says. “I would’ve come from any distance. Against any odds.”
That renders me mute for a moment. “But what if you hadn’t gotten to me in time? What if I’d fallen?”
“Then I would’ve jumped after you.”
He says it with such simplicity that a bolt of wonder drills into me, sharp enough to steal my breath. All my life, I’ve dreamed of being wanted. Cherished. Somewhere deep, in a locked, forgotten room inside me, something rattles its cage and begs to break loose.
But I press it back down. I glance up, only to find myself falling into liquid pools of gold, and I drop my gaze again, my eyes fluttering shut.
This goblin is dangerous. To look at, to be around, to touch. The fact that he exists at all terrifies me.
Still, I let him carry me onward. But as he cradles me close, I wonder if maybe, just maybe, dying in that abyss will someday turn out to have been the better choice.