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“Where is Lady Galantia?” Gone. Galantia was gone, leaving nothing behind but a couple of white feathers that drifted in the air. What in the ever-loving fuck had just happened?
“Find the white Raven! Catch the unkindness, and bring it to me!” White Raven. Yes. Galantia was a white Raven.
Malyr scooped the bird into his palm, lifting and pressing it to his chest with one hand before he covered it with the other and turned away. “I want every single fate in this castle to look at this anoa and give me answers!”
Because Malyr one-handedly dragged a large, temple-shaped, gilded bird cage from a dark corner, many of its golden wires bent and covered in a dark reddish-brown that sure as fuck wasn’t rust—it was dried blood. By the state of the cage, this must have been where he’d locked up his anoa, getting his bird into such a frenzy to escape, it must’ve cut itself on the wire.
Malyr might have finally broken me, but I was not dead, not yet at least. He might have failed to kill me, but the cold wouldn’t. Where in the seven hells was I?
“Nobody can find any of your feathers, as unsusceptible as they might seem.” She kept yanking on the fabric, letting it pool by my feet. “If anybody finds out, then we are both as good as dead.”
words to me as an infant. But how, if she’d given me away? Why was it so easy for everyone to just… get rid of me? How could she have truly loved me, yet exchanged me for a purse of coins as if I was merely a loaf of bread?
“No. No…” A strangled sob tore from my lips. No, this couldn’t be. It was too cruel, too menacing, too fucking painful. “Yes,” Marla said in a hushed voice. “You, Galantia, are Malyr’s fated mate.
What if I’d frayed our bond to a degree it would never recover? But was that not a good thing? It wasn’t like I intended to bond myself to Galantia. No, I did not. I should not. I was not fit to bond.
why I hadn’t sensed that Galantia was my fated mate. A dark chuckle escaped me. Oh, but I had felt it.
The sight gnawed at my insides—scratching, scraping—shadows convoluting my chest with the same density they fogged my mind. Pitch-black darkness settled onto my thoughts. Who was he to feed my mate?
What if he was… in love? With. My. Mate.
It was before she’d spent cold winter mornings on my lap at my desk, the both of us wrapped in a blanket, practicing her gods-awful handwriting. That was before I fell in love with her…
“I will come for you,” Malyr’s dark threat purred through my memory, “because you are mine.”
Black boots stepped into my vision, stopping less than an inch from my white-knuckled fingers. “Whatever are you trying to achieve here, my little white dove?” The hair along my nape rose at the sound of the pet name.
“You were in my room last night.” “I once warned you not to leave your window open.”
“I’m just not fond of you.” “Mmm, little white dove, you ought to leave the lying to me.”
“Who you thought I was doesn’t unbreak me.”
“Hear me, Galantia. No matter where you go, no matter what form you take, I will find you. You cannot outrun me. You cannot outfly me. Every path you tread, be it north, east, south, or west, I will chase after because… you… are… mine.”
“Are you trying to have me believe that your affection was sincere?”
“All of it.”
“You want to know what made it worse? How I loved to spend my days with you outdoors, my mornings with you at my desk, my nights with you in our nest. You are quite extraordinary, Galantia, in a way that is not obvious, unless someone looks closer. I looked closer. And what I saw, I loved.”
That I did not indeed betray the memory of my entire family with how I longed for you, wanted you, spent every fucking second… obsessing over you.”
“I loved how curiously you watched the little girl at the cliff, loved how you cantered over that meadow, loved how you braided my hair, and loved just about any other fucking mundane moment between us.”
“And I hated you even more for making me feel that way, anoaley.”
“You feel it, do you not? Even without your gift, you can feel it. We are two parts of one whole.”
“From the moment I first saw you, I felt it. You and I belong together. Forever.”
No man ever looked at me the way Malyr did now, giving me his undivided attention, as though I were the very epicenter of his universe.
Well, he could devour this. I spat at him, unfortunately missing his mouth by the width of a finger, but the way it hit his bottom lip was enough to make his head jerk back and his eyes rip wide open in shock. “This is the closest your mouth will ever come to mine again.”
“Which do you prefer? A count from five, or a sudden push? Choose.” Turning my head within the collar of his hand, I lifted my chin at him. “I’m indifferent either way. I would rather jump off this cliff than bond myself to you.”
“Fly, Galantia.” Then he pushed me off the cliff.
“If you’re seriously considering to let her walk back into Tidestone, Malyr, then you’re a shitty fucking mate.” Malyr’s eyes narrowed to dangerous slits, sparking with a raw intensity that rivaled the savage gales whipping around us. “You must know.” “That was low,”
“Where is your wife?” Malyr let his gaze stroll lazily over my form. “I am looking at her right now.” “I’m not your wife,” I snarled. “You will be so much more once we are bonded.”
“Do not make me watch you die… My heart can’t survive it a fourteenth time.”
Something I’d never felt before, but… it seemed like the beginning and end of my very being. “Galantia,” I choked out, the name searing through me, carving its path into my very core where my bond hummed a chaotic tune.
What I’d always hoped she would be. My very own void.
“What do voids even do, other than remove shadows?” “Nothing.” “Exactly…” They did nothing, like I had all my life, with no shadows of my own, no agency. “Does it always hurt like this?” “After a lifetime of being deprived the shadows it craves, your void is starved, child. Now drink.”
“All night, he spent beside you, guarding over your sleep until other responsibilities called him away,” she said, as though he’d done so out of concern for me, and not how I could benefit him. “He is your fated mate, Galantia.”
When I had carved my sigil into her flesh? When I had choked her with my cock, my shadows, my hand? Or perhaps the day I’d ripped through her maidenhead with my fingers? When I’d told myself that I hated her, and that I needed to shatter her heart?
I folded my hands behind my back, carefully breathing past the jealousy over a situation of my own making. I understood that, though my shadows, however, did not, threatening to overwhelm me—to make me do something truly regrettable.
“Whatever you two are practicing right this moment,” Malyr drawled nearby, his voice roughened by something that sent a shudder down my spine, “I daresay it has little to do with handling your void, little dove.”
“Whatever is it you have been doing? It clearly left you… aching.”
“Do you have any idea what it feels like to see his treasures on your wrist? The lips of my anoaley pressed to his?”
“Swallow them, little dove, until you are sated. Open up. Let me in. Take as much of me as you need.”
“I stopped looking for you years ago, anoaley. Why did you have to run into my arms, hmm? Why?” A lap at the corner of my mouth. “Now I’m like a beast trained on the scent of your blood, utterly, irrefutably, immutably fixed on hunting… you… down.”
How long do you presume you can keep up this chase, little dove?” I backed away until my calves pressed against sacks of stacked grains. “Until you learn to take ‘no’ for an answer." “If you confuse a beast for a pet easily commanded off, chances are, you will get yourself bit.”
“Every shroud of darkness, every wicked desire, every single fucked-up part of me, I poured into you. You have experienced my depravity, my hatred, those suffocating shadows at my core.” His fingers kept on fumbling, more frantically now. “And you liked it. Goddess, help me… please tell me you liked it.”
“Because if you did, then what could possibly scare you so much that you keep trying to run from me, hmm? If you loved all the shattered pieces that I am, how can the goddess not have made you to be mine?”
I turned back toward the river and shoved the bracelet into the fold of my tunic. It was bloodied now anyway. Ruined, just like my chances to ever bond with her, and was that not a good thing?
“Why?” My void might be strong—or so they claimed—but none of the shadows at Tidestone moved toward me if I kept a healthy distance. This? This was a three-day flight of distance. “I don’t understand…” Malyr took a deep breath, releasing it all on a mumbled, “I fear you will understand soon enough.”
