Shadowbound

Probably

Dommik cradled me as we rode away from the assailants’ campsite. My tired limbs were curled into him, my torn clothing covered by his cloak. I was surrounded by the scent and safety of him.

Leather, pine, and the unmistakable metallic tang of freshly spilled blood. He was earth…and death. My savior and my sword.

He hadn’t just killed the men. He’d ripped them apart and thrown their severed limbs into their campfire. No hesitation, no questions. And I found a twisted comfort in knowing there were at least two less monsters to fear in the world.

Asher bobbed beneath us but Dommik held me so tight and so close, my cheek didn’t bounce against the leather covering his shoulder. I nuzzled deeper into the crook of his neck and said weakly, “I don’t want to go back yet.”

Dommik squeezed me tighter. “If that’s what you command, I’ll see it done.”

Everything about me was heavy. My limbs. My lids. The thoughts weighing on my mind. “I’m too tired to command.” I sighed.

“Home, Asher.”

For the first time in nearly two weeks, I didn’t dream of the shade.

I dreamt of a meadow bathed in sunlight.

Of a man fishing in a nearby stream in casual dress.

I was pouring us each a glass of wine as he turned to show me what he’d caught.

Dommik’s wide, dimpled grin—a fabrication of my imagination—gleamed back at me, fangs and all.

Waking was a painful return to reality. My mouth was dry as sand and my head pounded like a war drum.

“Fuck…” I groaned, pressing a hand to my clammy forehead.

“Regretting your night out?” Dommik chided from a perch next to the bed. The room around me was strangely familiar, but definitely wasn’t the Hive. I peeked an eye open and recognized not just the stack of wine barrels, but shelves of worn books.

We were in the cellar of Dommik’s family estate. He’d called it a safe house the first time we’d taken shelter here. At this rate, it was becoming more a recovery ward than a refuge.

My eyes reluctantly slid to Dommik, my lids heavy with hangover and shame from my dream. About him.

“Only slightly,” I said. “It was fun…until it wasn’t.”

I remembered the music, the buzz of the ale, and Alba. Alba. Where was Alba? Acid bubbled in my gut. I’d abandoned her. Well, not by choice. I hoped Shaw had been a gentleman and seen her home safely.

Clunk.

“Just in case,” Dommik said, setting down a wooden bucket next to me.

I looked up to him. His expression was a puzzle. Caring, annoyed, concerned, upset. All flashing simultaneously across his features.

“Is it evening?” I strained to sit upright.

“Nearly,” he said, placing the chair at my bedside and straddling it. Underneath his body, it looked like a child’s chair.

I slowly sat upright and his eyes swept over my body. No, not my body. His shirt. It wasn’t the first time I’d worn something of his. Or the first time he’d seen me in his clothes. But something had changed between us since he’d knelt for me.

“Do you…need this back?” I asked awkwardly, ready to pull the shirt over my head.

He put his hand up and cleared his throat. “Eventually, but not right this moment.”

I dropped my hands, embarrassed. Of course. Why would I think it was a good idea to strip in front of him?

My hangover sucked all common sense out of my head.

Into my hands, I grumbled, “So, what do we do now? Back to the Hive?”

“Your attackers. They were wearing Day Guard uniforms. We need to confirm who they were before I can let you return to the Hive.” Dommik was rearranging items in his pack.

Details from the prior night came like flimsy visions. One man’s crooked teeth, the other’s body odor. Then, what they’d talked about. “They weren’t Day Guard.”

Dommik froze and flicked his gaze toward me. “How do you know that?”

“I heard them talking,” I stammered as my memory fast-forwarded to their final moments. The echo of fear of their approaching footsteps and everything the attackers alluded to panged against the walls of my mind.

I hugged my knees to my chest and Dommik flew to my bedside. Warmth spread from his hand on my back. In slow, soothing strokes, his palm rubbed up and down my spine.

“It’s okay. You’re safe and they’re not coming back.” His eyes descended into the color of midnight seas. “Ever.”

I nodded to him and wiped a shallow tear away before I said, “They were sent by Eryx.”

Dommk’s hand stilled.

“You’re sure?”

“Mhmm.” I rolled my lips together, let out a shaky exhale and continued, “They said I was worth a lot and that Eryx wanted me delivered alive.”

His hand resumed. “Anything else?”

“They used you as a lure to—” I sniffled “—to get me to follow them.”

I dropped my forehead to my knees. I’d been so na?ve, so idiotic for believing them.

Rather than blindly follow, I should have stayed inside.

Found Dommik in the crowd. Or Alba. Or anyone else I knew.

Signaled someone, somehow. But no, like a lamb to slaughter, I just went along.

For the sake of not making a scene and being polite.

“Shh.” Dommik wrapped his arms around me. My body tipped as he took a seat on the bed next to me. His chin rested on my hair and I let my head fall to his chest.

“I shouldn’t have listened.”

“Stop. You couldn’t have known.”

He was being kind. I absolutely could have and should have known. But I was drunk, and distracted by my feelings.

The critical thinking I hadn’t been able to lean on the night before suddenly crashed into me like an avalanche. “Does this mean Eryx knows?”

I sat upright, looking into Dommik’s concerned, stormy eyes.

“He knows about me. My gift. That we took the book. Why else would he send men to abduct me?”

“Probably.” He swallowed and my eyes were drawn to the way his jaw flexed beneath his dark stubble.

“He’ll try again? Won’t he?”

Dommik’s stare hardened. It was a look I’d become all too familiar with. A look that meant he was about to share unfortunate news. “Probably.”

This was the constant fear I thought I would live with when I relinquished myself to the Hive. It was there all along, lurking, waiting for me to think I could live happily and safely before it sunk its teeth into me. What a cruel and clever predator.

A manic chuckle that didn’t sound like my own rumbled through me. But it had to be me, because Dommik’s mouth was pressed into a thin, concerned line.

“Great! That’s just great.” My feet met the cold stone of the cellar floor and Dommik’s oversized shirt fell to the middle of my bare thighs.

I looked down at my legs and then back to him. I didn’t remember removing my skirt.

“It had blood on it,” he explained.

“Right.” I lifted a hand to my forehead and began pacing. “Of course it had blood on it because you slaughtered those men sent to attack me.” My body ached from the dancing and my head throbbed from my piercing, sarcastic tone. “Because all anyone wants from me, is my fucking gift!”

“That’s not true.” Dommik scoffed and dropped his head, shaking it slightly as he picked at a loose thread from the bed.

“Of course it is!” I threw my hands up to the ceiling but quickly lowered them when I felt cold air meet the skin just beneath my ass.

“Rhazien wants me to locate Lorana’s stone so he can ascend and wake Lorana to prevent a war that Eryx wants to start because he’s a horrid, horrid creature who wants to enslave all mortals. And you—”

The glare that leveled me from across the room was enough to stop my tirade in its tracks. I licked my lips in my pause. Dommik tipped his head, waiting.

“Go on, what about me?”

“You—” Dommik stood. “You—” I hesitated, measuring my words. He stopped, just shy of closing our gap entirely. But he stopped. His defensive stance only one pace away left just enough room for whatever words I could hurl at him next.

“I—” he cocked a brow and growled “—what?”

Lingering on my tongue, just behind my teeth, was a question I had asked him weeks prior in this very cellar. But it didn’t come out as a question. It took the form of an accusation.

I mimicked his stance, grounding myself before I said, “You don’t see me.”

He narrowed his gaze.

“When you look at me, you see someone else. Someone you won’t mention. Someone you wronged. A mistake you can’t fix.” I folded my arms over my chest. “You can’t stand the sight of me, yet you can’t seem to look away.”

“Hm.” One by one, he bent his fingers, cracking the bones in his hands in an otherwise tense silence. Dommik’s next breath lifted his whole chest. He rolled his shoulders back, as if summoning strength and courage.

“It’s true. You do remind me of someone. My second greatest failure.” He scoffed and gestured to the space around us. “Worse than my failure to ever live up to my father’s expectations.”

It was his turn to pace. A heaviness descended on me as I watched him rub at the back of his neck. He’d never shared anything about his human life, and I hadn’t asked, except about her. Shame pricked at my arms, leaving goosebumps in their wake.

“My family was long-dead when I turned. The disappointing second-son outlived the wealthy father.” He slumped into the chair next to the bed.

“Eryx was already in power when my makers brought me to the Northern Hive. Not having lived under the ruler before him, I had no understanding of the level of his cruelty. His predecessor was more like Rhazien. Appointed by Lorana, he was a firm ruler, but the village outside their Hive had been filled with people who lived peacefully next to them.”

I vaguely remembered the decrepit buildings near the Northern Hive. With no residents, there were no candles or torchlight. Just the shells of abandoned life illuminated by the waning moonlight. Homes, barns, wells, all crumbling beneath the earth as it reclaimed them.

“As a human, I’d been a trained soldier. As a fledgling, I was made into a weapon. Eryx wielded me and others like Vaspar to strengthen his rule, to root out dissenters, and punish them accordingly. That’s how I existed for sixty years.”

I was quiet and still as Dommik bared himself to me. His hands ran through his disheveled hair before they fell to his knees, palms up as if to beg for forgiveness.

“I’m not proud of who I was. I’ve done horrible, unforgivable things, Reyva.”

A fresh shiver quaked down my spine and settled in my gut where it churned last night’s ale. I didn’t dare submit to the nausea. I wanted to hear every word Dommik would allow himself to share.

“But then—” his breathing changed, quickening slightly “—then I met Kaia.”

Her name cracked on his lips. Like he hadn’t formed the shape of it in decades. Dommik bit his lip and stared at the floor, lost to his thoughts.

He took in a sharp inhale and continued, “She—uh—” he cleared his throat “—she was born in the Northern Hive for breeding. I was given sentinel duty and, over time, we—” he stammered and struggled to recount his memories.

“Dommik, you don’t have to—” I took the smallest step toward him.

“No. You asked. More than once. I just,” his face fell into his hands, “I never speak about it—or her. And this is why.”

I rubbed my arm as I took another small step. “Would it be easier if you showed me?”

Dommik spread his fingers, questioning eyes peeking through the cracks. His response muffled in his palms, “Can you?”

I sat on the bed next to him again. “Maybe. If you can think of something unique to her—a necklace, a ring, something of hers—it would make it easier.”

“I don’t know if I want you rooting around in my mind and digging up the pain I buried.”

I lifted my hands in retreat. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

Dommik studied me. My hands were folded in my lap, one crossed over the other, just like my bare ankles. No assertion. No expectation. I hoped he saw me as just a person—a friend—sitting quietly, leaving space for him. What he did with that space was entirely up to him.

He rolled out his neck and groaned, “Okay.”

“Only if you want to—”

“I said okay,” he snipped, extending his hand to me.

I looked at his calloused palm. Rough and worn from his time as a soldier before he’d been turned and—as he said—forged into a weapon for Eryx. My gaze flicked to his.

“What’s the item?”

He exhaled in his hesitation. “The Forest and The Flame.”

The book he’d gifted me. One of the few personal comforts I had at the Northern Hive was something of hers? My heart fluttered and my posture tensed.

“Okay,” I croaked.

Then, I took his hand.