Page 75 of Sanctuary of the Shadow
False love. Love that was a lie.
For Mellora, she had to do this.
Steeling herself, she turned to Darya. “Send me back now. I’m ready to wake up.”
Chapter Sixteen
Harrow blinked her eyes open. The stress responses she’d felt in the dream—shaking, sweating, nausea—didn’t transfer over to her reality. At first, she felt sleepy, relaxed. The warm weight of another body was curled around her from behind, a heavy arm wrapped around her middle. The room was quiet. Dark, save for the blue glow of moonlight.
Everything came back in a rush.
The shaking started immediately, but she froze in place, terrified. At any moment, Raith could awaken and…
And what? Kill her? Or just look at her in hurt confusion because he didn’t understand why she suddenly feared him? Goddess, that would be harder to face than him attacking her.
He truly remembered nothing. Darya had confirmed it. He hadn’t been lying about that, but had he lied about anything else? How much of what they’d shared was real? All of it? None of it? It didn’t matter anyway.
She could never meet his eyes again without seeing him for what he was.
A killer. An abomination.
Tears spilled down her cheeks to soak the pillowcase. She trembled with fear in his embrace yet still hesitated to leave it. What was wrong with her? She was lying naked in bed with the monster who had murdered her family. It was sickening. She would never recover from the shame.
Worse, she couldn’t just turn off her feelings for him. Her body wanted to snuggle back against his, burrow into his embrace, breathe his warm scent, savor that safe bubble he always made her feel she was in.
False security. False intimacy.
Killer. Murderer. Abomination.
With shaking hands, she lifted his arm and crawled out from under it. Sliding her bare feet to the cool floor, she rose from the bed, turning back around to face the man she left behind.
His body was a pure, inky void.
A scream caught in her throat. His hair, skin—even his lips—were utter darkness. No hint of his former brown, no depth of tone. It was like he was an absence in the room, rather than a being who occupied space.
Just flat black. Pure shadow.
He looked…wrong. Like an apparition that should not have existed in the world.
Salizar had told her about this, hadn’t he? And she’d just brushed him off, thinking him a cruel madman at the time. Raith had fangs, leathery wings, unnatural eyes, and skin made of shadows, and she’d thoughtSalizarthe madman? How had she been so oblivious to the obvious?
Raith really was a wraith. The very wraith who had killed her family.
The unbearable weight of the truth settled over her, and a new pang of agony sliced across her heart—grief. Grief for her lost love. Because she had truly loved him, only to discover he wasn’t even close to what she thought he was.
The tears spilled down her cheeks freely, obscuring her sight. Not that she could see much of him. In the night, he nearly disappeared completely, disguising himself in the slightest shadow like a ghost.
A shadow of death passing over the full moon’s face.
Even now, she still loved him, or at least she loved who she’d thought he was. That was the hardest thing of all. As she backed slowly away from the bed, grabbing a dress and robe from her bag and donning them with shaking hands, one part of her was desperate to escape while another part longed to climb back into bed beside him. Knowing he was trapped in that dream reliving his memories didn’t help. Was he hurting? Afraid?
No.She steeled herself. He was a killer, and not just any killer. The very one who killed her beautiful mother and her entire clan. He was an abomination, as Darya had said. He needed to be put down.
Just then, Raith moaned low and twisted in the bed as if in agony. Oh Goddess, he was in pain right now, trapped in the horrors of his past. Her breath hitched. Her hands ached to reach for him. Her heart broke just looking at him. Her old wounds of grief for her family were torn open anew at the sight of him.
She could never look at him again without seeing that blood on his hands.
It was that thought that finally got her to turn away. She crossed the room to the door, eyes so blurred by tears she couldn’t see it. Reaching a shaking hand out to unlatch the lock, she pulled the door ajar and then hesitated. The urge to turn back was nearly overwhelming, but she fought it hard.
