Marked By the Shadow King

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

MORGANA

The alarm screams three seconds before I cut the wire.

My hands are steady, as they always are when I’m stealing something worth millions, but my heart hammers against my ribs like it’s trying to escape my chest. The Prague night presses against the museum’s skylight above me, cold and endless, while I dangle forty feet above marble floors that will absolutely kill me if this rope snaps.

“Raven, you have ninety seconds before the next security sweep,” Marcus crackles in my earpiece. “Make it fast.”

Fast. Right. Because stealing a priceless obsidian mirror from a private collection guarded by lasers, pressure plates, and enough security to protect nuclear codes is supposed to be fast.

I love my job.

The mirror sits in its climate-controlled case below me, ancient and wrong in a way that makes my skin crawl every time I look at it.

My mysterious client, five years of jobs, millions in payments, never once showing his face, wants this piece badly enough to offer seven figures.

Who am I to argue with that kind of money?

I rappel down in silence, my black tactical gear blending into the shadows.

The museum is so quiet I can hear the faint creak of the rope above me and the whisper of my own breath inside the mask.

The distant tick of some antique clock buried in a room I’ll never see mimics my heartbeat softly in the background.

Places like this always pretend they’re peaceful, but they aren’t.

They’re holding their breath around everything people have killed, lied, and conquered to possess.

The Bellamy family fortune means I never need to steal anything in my life. My trust fund could buy this entire museum twice over.

There are easier hobbies for women with black cards and generational wealth. Pilates. Philanthropy. Marrying someone named Whitaker. Unfortunately, none of those come with laser grids and the possibility of plummeting forty feet onto imported marble.

Money cannot buy the rush of adrenalin, the sharp thrill of doing something forbidden, the electric feeling of standing on the edge between success and disaster.

My therapist says I have self-destructive, thrill-seeking tendencies stemming from childhood emotional neglect.

I say I am bored, and stealing priceless artifacts beats another charity gala full of fake smiles and faker friends.

I land beside the case, my boots touching down soft as a whisper.

Up close, the mirror is worse. Black volcanic glass polished to an impossible smoothness, its frame carved with symbols that seem to shift when I’m not looking directly at them.

It hums, a low vibration I can feel in my teeth.

For one impossible second, the symbols along the frame seem to lean toward me.

“Sixty seconds, Raven.”

I pull out my glass cutter and get to work. My client’s instructions are always specific. Touch the artifacts as little as possible. Use gloves. Don’t let them sit in direct moonlight. Strange rules for a strange job, but his money is spent just fine.

The case opens with a soft hiss. I reach in carefully, lifting the mirror from its velvet cradle with gloved hands.

My glove catches on the edge.

No—not catches.

Something hooks it. A carved symbol that was smooth a second ago lifts like a thorn.

As the glove tears, my bare fingers brush the glass, and then the world screams.

Reality splits open above me with a sound like a thousand windows shattering at once.

Purple energy rips across the ceiling, spreading like a wound in space.

The blaring museum alarm stretches into a warped metallic whine as glass cases tremble in their frames.

Beneath it all comes a low-frequency hum, so deep I feel it in my bones before I hear it.

Like something enormous has pressed its mouth against the world and begun to breathe.

I stumble back, my rope swinging wildly, as something massive presses against the tear.

“What the hell—” Marcus’s voice cuts to static.

The mirror slips from my hands and hits the marble floor.

It cracks straight down the middle.

The temperature drops so fast my breath ghosts white in front of my face. The air turns metallic, thick with old copper and stagnant water, as if someone has opened a tomb beneath the city. My skin prickles under my tactical gear.

And then the sky starts bleeding.

What are those?

Monsters.

They pour through the tear like oil from a ruptured tank. Thick. Wrong. Alive.

I hang frozen, forty feet in the air, watching things that should not exist flood into Prague’s night sky. My brain tries to catalogue them, out of habit, but they will not stay still long enough to understand.

Too many limbs. Too many joints. Legs splitting where arms should be, elbows bending backward, fingers unfolding into smaller fingers.

Eyes glowing sickly purple, dozens of them blinking out of sync.

Their bodies look like anatomy translated badly into a nightmare, all inky angles and impossible geometry, as if someone tried to draw a predator from memory and forgot how bones work.

One drops onto the museum floor below me. Marble cracks beneath its weight. It makes a sound no living throat should make—a wet, leathery tearing. Not a scream. Not a growl. Something between an animal dying and a machine waking up hungry.

It tilts what might be a head upward.

All those eyes lock onto me.

“Oh, fuck.”

My hands shake as I fumble for the ascent control on my harness. The rope jerks and begins pulling me up, but I am too slow.

The creature crouches. Its legs fold backward like an insect’s.

Then it launches.

I see its claws, curved and dripping something black.

They are going to punch through my chest and?—

The room goes silent.

Not quiet. Silent.

The alarms cut out. The static in my ear dies. Even the creature’s impossible sound vanishes as every shadow in the museum pulls toward a single point beneath me. The air turns heavy, charged with ozone and cold pressure, like the second before lightning strikes.

The creature hesitates.

Something worse has entered the room.

From the center of the gathered darkness, a hand lifts.

Pale. Gloved. Unhurried.

As if whoever it belongs to has all the time in the world.

The creature explodes mid-air.

One moment it is there. The next, it is gone, torn into ribbons of shadow that dissolve before they hit the ground.

I twist on the rope, my heart slamming painfully against my ribs.

A man stands where the creature died.

No. Not stands.

He appears.

As if the darkness itself shaped him.

Tall, broad-shouldered. Dressed in black armor that looks as if it were forged from shadow. His hair is dark, almost blue-black under the flashing emergency lights.

But his eyes?—

Dark blue.

Not normal. Not human.

Cold. Violent. Locked onto me with an intensity that makes my skin prickle.

Behind him, more figures appear. Six men in the same black armor, moving through the museum with lethal precision.

Soldiers. Maybe.

Or something worse.

They move like water. Like darkness given purpose. Their weapons are wrong too; blades that seem to swallow light and leave shadows trailing behind them.

They cut through the creatures with terrifying ease.

The tall man does not move.

He just watches me hang there like a particularly stupid fish caught on a hook.

“Down,” he says.

His voice is quiet, controlled, edged with something dangerous. The kind of voice that makes you obey before you even realize you are doing it.

“Now.”

I stare at him, thoughts colliding and slipping away before they can settle.

Run. That is the instinct.

But how exactly am I supposed to run while dangling from a rope?

My hands still shake as I hit the descent control. The rope lowers me in uneven drops.

I cannot stop looking at him.

The way shadows cling to his armor, moving even when the light does not.

At the anger burning in those impossible blue eyes.

I hit the ground.

My legs nearly give out.

He is in front of me before I can react.

Fast.

Too fast.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

Each word is precisely enunciated. Perfectly controlled. Which somehow makes them more terrifying than if he had been screaming.

I stumble backward. My heel hits the fallen mirror, still split into two pieces, both edges glowing with that strange purple energy. “I don’t. I didn’t.”

“Five years.” He advances, and I retreat until my back collides with the display case. “For five years, I have been collecting those artifacts. Five years of careful planning, of sealing rifts across dimensions, of preventing exactly this.” He gestures sharply upward.

Through the museum’s skylight, the tear spreads. It grows wider by the second, with more creatures pouring through.

My stomach drops. “The artifacts...”

“Were seals.” His voice lowers to something quieter, deadlier. “Each one a component binding the rifts between worlds. And you just shattered the final piece. I warned you to be careful with them.”

The realization hits all at once. The strange instructions. Touch as little as possible. No moonlight. The millions he paid.

“You’re my client.”

“Azrael Nightveil,” he says it like I should recognize it, like it should mean something. The shadows at his feet ripple when he says it, as if even they recognize the name. “King of the Shadow Court. And you, little thief, just declared war on two dimensions.”

A scream cuts through the air outside.

The sound goes straight through me. Someone is out there. Terrified. Not movie-scream. Not distant-disaster scream. A real human sound, ragged and breaking, close enough that for one awful second I can imagine the shape of the person making it.

I try to move past him. “There are people out there.”

His hand shoots out and catches my wrist. His grip is iron, cold enough to burn.

“My soldiers will handle containment.”

“Containment?” I yank at my arm, but it is like pulling against a steel beam. “Those things are killing people.”