One Dark Window (The Shepherd King, #1)

by Rachel Gillig

My magic moves, he said. My magic bites. My magic soothes. My magic frights. You are young and not so bold. I am unflinching—five hundred years old.

“Of all the things I pretend at,” he said, his thumb drawing small, gentle circles along my waist, “courting you has proven the easiest.”

“I resisted,” Ravyn said, “because I haven’t stopped thinking about you since that first night on the forest road. And I realized at Equinox that the closer I let myself get to you, the less I’d want to be the King’s Captain—the less I’d want to pretend. And it’s dangerous for me, for my family, to stop pretending.” He pressed his lips to the shell of my ear, a low, scraping whisper. “It’s not safe to draw too close to me. I’m a liar, Elspeth. A traitor. And someday, there will be a reckoning.” He pulled back, his gray eyes tight with strain. “The highwayman meets the hangman. Always.”

no one had ever held me so tightly—as if they needed me in their arms as much as I needed to be held. As if nothing else mattered but to hold one another.

“I don’t want rest, Elspeth,” he murmured into my lips. “I want you.”