Chapter 5
Chapter
Five
MORGANA
Day one: I try to leave.
The palace has approximately forty-seven exits I can find. Doors, windows, balconies, and what looks like a servants’ entrance near the kitchens. I catalogue them all during my careful exploration, memorizing routes and noting guard patterns.
I make it to the main entrance before the pain starts.
It begins as pressure. A tightness in my chest, like someone has wrapped steel bands around my ribs and started cranking them tighter. I push through it, one hand braced against the massive obsidian doors, shoving with everything I have.
The bands turn to knives.
I’m on my knees before I even register falling. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. White-hot agony lances through every nerve; my vision narrows to a pinpoint of black-edged nothing.
The pain vanishes the instant I crawl backward, away from the door.
I sit on the cold floor for twenty minutes, gasping, while guards pretend not to notice me.
Day two: I try to hit him.
Azrael summons me to the throne room. I feel the pull through the binding, an insistent tug behind my sternum that makes walking in the opposite direction physically uncomfortable, like fighting a riptide.
He is reviewing reports with Kieran when I arrive. He doesn’t look up. Just gestures vaguely at a chair.
I walk past the chair and march straight up to him, pulling back my fist to aim for that perfect aristocratic jaw.
My own magic throws me backward.
I hit the floor hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. The binding marks on my wrists burn, shadows writhing under my skin like angry snakes. My hand, the one I tried to hit him with, is numb from fingertips to elbow.
Azrael finally looks at me. One eyebrow raised.
“Feel better?”
I flip him off with my other hand.
Kieran makes a sound that might be a suppressed laugh.
The numbness in my arm lasts for six hours.
Day three: I try to disobey.
“Go to your room,” Azrael says. We’re in some kind of war council. Him, his inner circle, maps spread across a table showing Earth and this dimension overlapped. I’m not supposed to be here. I showed up anyway because screw him and his rules.
I plant my feet. Cross my arms. “No.”
The binding flexes.
It’s not pain this time. It’s worse. My body moves without my permission. Legs turning. Feet walking. I’m fighting every step, but my muscles don’t listen anymore. They belong to him now.
“Stop,” I grit out. My jaw is the only thing I can still move. “Stop, you bastard?—”
He releases me halfway down the corridor.
I collapse against the wall, shaking. Tears of rage burn behind my eyes. I refuse to let them fall.
This binding is absolute.
I’ve never felt so powerless in my life.
The servants talk when they think I’m not listening.
I am always listening. If I can’t leave, I can still collect keys. Names. Habits. Weaknesses. Secrets.
“One hundred years,” one of them murmurs while changing the sheets in my cage-like room. A young girl, maybe twenty, with silver-white hair. “King Azrael has ruled that long. Some say he has never smiled in that entire time.”
Her companion, older, with the kind of face that has seen things it does not want to remember, makes a dismissive sound. “Longer than that, if you count the blood wars before his coronation. He was considered young when he took the throne.”
“Young?” the girl asks.
“For one of us,” the older woman says. “Not for a human.”
I’m on the balcony, pretending not to hear them. Every word still burns itself into my memory.
“They say he has never taken a lover,” the young one continues. Her voice turns wistful. Stupid girl. “Never shown weakness. Never lost a battle.”
“That is because shadow magic changes you,” the older woman says. Her voice drops. “Darkness seeps into your soul the longer you wield it. Twists you from the inside. You do not love something like that. You fear it.”
“The old ones say that is the true test of every Shadow ruler,” she adds. “Not whether he can command the darkness. Whether he can keep it from commanding him.”
I watch the impossible city below. Buildings spiraling into a purple sky. Bridges made of literal shadow.
Twenty years of ruling through shadow magic. Twenty years of letting darkness consume him bit by bit.
He looks like he could be in his thirties, but I no longer trust human math in this place. The weight in his eyes feels older than his face. Colder. Heavier.
And I am what? A temporary problem? A five-year inconvenience he will forget the second the binding ends?
The thought shouldn’t bother me, but it does.
The palace watches me constantly.
I notice it on the second day. The way shadows in corners seem to track my movement. How darkness pools in doorways when I pass, then dissipates once I’m gone. Servants avert their eyes when I catch them staring, but it’s not them I’m worried about.
It's the building itself.
Sometimes I turn too quickly and catch the darkness withdrawing from keyholes, mirrors, the seams beneath doors. Like the palace isn’t looking at me directly. Like it’s trying to be polite about the violation.
“Does he know?” I ask Chella when she brings my dinner. The warrior woman is the closest thing to friendly I’ve encountered here. Still not a friend. But she hasn’t tried to kill me yet, which puts her ahead of most. I can’t tell if that is kindness, strategy, or the Shadow Court version of both.
“Does who know what?” She sets the tray down with food I can’t identify. Everything here is wrong. Too intense in taste, too vivid.
“Your king. Does he know everything I do? Everywhere I go?” I gesture at the shadows pooling in my doorway. “Is he watching me now?”
Chella’s expression does not change. But something flickers in her ice-blue eyes. Almost pity.
“The palace is an extension of his power,” she says. “What it sees, he can see. If he chooses to watch.”
My stomach drops. “So he’s been?—”
“Probably not.” She turns to leave, then pauses at the door. “He has two worlds to manage. A war to prevent. He does not have time to monitor one human thief’s every movement.”
Her lips quirk, almost a smile.
“But he could. If he wanted to.”
She’s gone before I can respond.
I lie awake that night, wondering if he is watching me sleep.
Hating that part of me hopes he is.
The summons comes on the afternoon of day four.
Not a pull through the binding this time. Kieran appears in my doorway, materializing from shadows the way they all do, and delivers the message with perfect formality.
“The king requests your presence in his private study.”
Requests. Right.
“Tell him I’m busy.” I don’t look up from the book I’ve been trying to read. Some kind of history of Aethermoor written in a language that shifts between English and something else, giving me a headache.
“It was not actually a request.” Kieran’s tone doesn’t change, still perfectly polite. “You have ten minutes to make yourself presentable.”
“Or what?”
“Or he will come get you himself.” Kieran tilts his head slightly. “You won’t enjoy that.”
He’s gone before I can throw the book at him.
I take fifteen minutes to get ready out of spite.
The study is different from the rest of the palace.
Less imposing, more lived-in. Dark wood paneling instead of black glass.
Leather furniture worn soft with age. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with volumes in a dozen languages I can and can’t read.
Weapons displayed on the walls, not for show, but like tools waiting to be used.
Swords with edges still sharp. Daggers with hilts molded to specific grips.
Behind the desk sits Azrael.
He’s not in his kingly attire. No armor. No elaborate clothing. Just dark pants and a shirt, still black, because apparently he owns nothing else, but casual in a way that feels wrong on him. The shirt is partially unbuttoned at the collar. Sleeves rolled to his elbows.
I can see his forearms, the lean muscle there, the shadow marks that match mine circling his wrists.
I hate that I notice.
Hate more that my mouth goes dry.
“Sit.” He doesn’t look up from whatever he’s reading.
I stay standing. “Kieran said you wanted to see me. Here I am. Talk.”
Now he looks up. Those storm-grey eyes lock onto mine with enough intensity to make my pulse stutter. “I said sit.”
The binding flexes. Warning.
My body obeys before my mind can mount a proper rebellion. I soon find that I’m in the leather chair across from his desk, spine rigid, hands gripping the armrests hard enough to hurt.
“Better.” He sets down whatever he was reading and leans back in his chair. Studies me with that unsettling focus. “How are you adjusting?”
“To being your slave?” I bare my teeth in something that is not quite a smile. “Just great. Having the time of my life.”
“You are not a slave.”
“Right. I’m bound to you by magic; I can’t leave, can’t disobey, can’t touch you without hurting myself. But definitely not a slave.”
Something flickers across his expression. Too fast to read. “The binding is temporary. Five years?—”
“Five years is a quarter of my life.” The words come out sharper than intended. “Maybe Elementals can afford to throw years around like loose change, but I can’t. For me?” I lean forward. “Five years is everything.”
He is quiet for a moment, just watching me.
Then: “We leave for Earth tomorrow.”
The subject change is so abrupt that it takes me a second to process. “What?”
“The mirror pieces. We need to collect them.” He pulls a map from the scattered papers. Earth, marked with red circles in various cities. “Two pieces in New York. One in London. One in Tokyo. Two more in places you will not have heard of.” His finger traces the marks. “We start in New York.”
My heart kicks hard.
Earth. Home.
I could run. The second we are there, I could?—
“Do not.” His eyes snap to mine.
I have not said a word, and somehow he has already answered me.
“I can feel what you are thinking through the binding. You are wondering if you can escape once we are on your home ground.”
Damn it.