Page 45 of The Bound Mage
Chapter
Nineteen
Loren woke with a gasp,her name on his lips.
Heat pulsed through him, his body aching with the memory of what she’d felt like pressed against him. The way her bare skin had tasted. The noise she’d made when his teeth had scraped over that skin—he groaned, his body throbbing with a need he hadn’t felt in twenty-five years of starvation and isolation. And all around him the shadows keened, blanketing the walls and writhing over the bed.
“Fuck,” he hissed, throwing back the covers.
The sheets tangled around his legs, tripping him. He slammed his shin into the bedframe, swearing viciously as he staggered toward the basin. He didn’t bother to warm the water, dousing his face and chest until his skin was numb and his heart had stopped pounding like it would escape his chest.
“Enough,” he growled, shaking off the shadows as they twined around him, her name a whispered chant in his ears. “She’s not here. Pull yourselves together.”
But she had been. Goddess help him—she’d been in his bed. Loren was sure of it.
She called. The shadows crowded close again, their hissing voices rising to a frenzy.For you. For us. She wants?—
“She didn’t,” Loren corrected, his voice hoarse. “It wasn’t her. It was the bond. Youknowthat.”
The shadows snarled their displeasure, cold tendrils lashing his skin like icy whips.No difference.
Loren slammed his fists against the stone, barely feeling the pain. “That’s not how she’ll see it. And I won’t—” he broke off, his breath tearing out of him in a ragged growl. “I won’t take something she doesn’t offer freely. Not after everything that’s already been taken from her.”
The shadows stilled, the cacophony of their voices falling silent for a single instant before they drew together, their words landing like a lash.
And why would she offer if you don’task?
Loren threw himself down on his bed, slamming his eyes closed. But he couldn’t banish the lingering echo of their question, gnawing at the edges of his resolve with sharp teeth through the long hours.
His head was pounding by the time the dawn finally lightened the sky outside his window, the city stirring to life far below. He dragged a hand over his face, hauling himself out of bed and tugging on his clothes with stiff, graceless hands.
He’d go to breakfast and make his excuses. Whatever Eloria wanted of him today would just have to wait. He didn’t have the strength to play prince—not when all he could think about was the hollow ache in his chest where she should have been.
But the sight that greeted him when he stepped into the solar where Eloria and Galen always took their breakfast together drove the haze from his mind like a blade to the gut.
“What are you doing here?” he snarled. The shadows rose at his back, answering his fear with their fury, every bit of it trained on his oldest friend—who was sittingherenext to Galen instead of guardingher.
“Good morning to you too, Loren,” Eloria said dryly, not looking up from buttering her bread. “Thorne arrived yesterday after you’d already retired—he brought you those candied blossoms you always loved.”
“Candied blossoms?” Loren echoed. The shadows mantled at his back, frost creeping across the windows.
“Veria wanted you to have them for your first Bloomtide home.” Thorne studied him with too-knowing eyes, barely sparing a glance for the seething darkness steadily growing thicker around them. “She’s safe, Loren. More than that—she’s finally getting comfortable simply existing with the full breadth of her power. She and Veria are going to have their own Bloomtide celebration.”
“She could lose control.” Loren’s voice cracked, the room darkening around them. Frost crept across the walls, his breath fogging the air in front of his face. “She could hurt herself or someone else?—”
A piece of bread smacked him in the shoulder.
The shadows reared back, affronted. But Eloria just ripped another piece of toast in half, balling it up between her fingers like she had when they were children.
“It’s far too early for you to be this dramatic,” she snapped, her green eyes flashing. “There’s only one person in this room losing control of his magic right now and that’syou.Your mate is in a warded castle behind a curtain of shadows thateatsanything that ventures too close to it. I’d hardly call thatunprotected.”
Her words rang in the sudden silence. Loren clenched his jaw so hard his teeth ached, his heart pounding against his ribs. Just last night she’d been in his bed at Ithralis—safe. But he’d had other dreams. Nightmares where Jaxon’s hands dragged her back into the dark. Chains on her wrists. A collar tight around her throat. He’d heard her scream, her desperate pleas echoingagainst the stone walls of the same cell that had held him for twenty-five years.
“I can’t—” his voice shook so badly he couldn’t continue, the darkness around him shuddering. Her imagined terror pierced his chest, his body bracing for a threat he couldn’t fight. He needed to see her. To confirm with his own eyes that she was safe. Then when she rejected him like she had in her dream he could walk away with at least that comfort.
“He needs to see her, El,” Galen said softly, laying his hand over hers. “I’d feel the same.”
Eloria sighed, her expression softening as she looked at her own mate.
