Chapter 2: Ten Thousand Steps
For six days, the shadows came without him.
They came every afternoon, the way they always had, but different now. They didn't curl on your shelves. They wound around your ankles while you worked, around your wrists while you ate, and once, while you were sitting on the bench trying not to think about anything, they wrapped themselves around your shoulders like a shawl and stayed there for an hour, cool and close and humming. The little glass vessel was gone with him. You'd made three more. They sat in all of them, in turns.
The bond didn't go away.
You'd read about mating bonds. Everybody had. They were the stuff of old ballads and cheap romances sold in paper covers at the stalls along the Sidra: the snap, the recognition, the sudden irrevocable tug. In the ballads it was always beautiful. Nobody mentioned that it would feel like a splinter lodged under your breastbone, or that you'd be able to feel him, every minute of the day, at the far end of it.
You could feel him now. He was somewhere high up and far away, east of the river. He was tired, and angry at himself, and underneath both those things, steady as a heartbeat, he wanted you so badly it made your knees weak.
He just wouldn't come.
On the sixth day, a different Illyrian came instead.
You knew who he was the moment he ducked into your studio: broader than Azriel, wilder, with long dark hair tied back carelessly, a crooked grin, and the general air of someone who'd never walked into a room he couldn't break. Red siphons glowed on the backs of his hands. He looked around your studio with frank delight, picked up a glass bird from your shelf, nearly dropped it, put it down very carefully with both hands, and turned to you.
"So you're her," said Cassian.
"I'm somebody."
"You're the somebody." He folded his arms and studied you, not unkindly. "Six days he's been doing training laps around the House of Wind. Six days. I've never seen him like this, and I've seen him drunk at a solstice party trying to explain lute strings to Mor. He nearly took Rhys's head off yesterday for asking if he'd had breakfast."
You set down your pipe. "Did he send you?"
"Gods, no. He'd kill me." Cassian grinned wider. "Feyre sent me. She says you've got about one more day before this gets bad for both of you. The bond doesn't like being ignored. It starts making people stupid." He sobered a little. "He thinks he'll ruin you, you know. He thinks he ruins everything he touches. He's believed it about as long as I've known him, and I've known him a few centuries."
"That's ridiculous."
"It is. I agree. Nobody's managed to tell him that in a way that sticks." Cassian tipped his head toward the window, toward the far peak of the House of Wind glowing against the evening sky. "Maybe you'll have better luck. Front door's at the top. Ten thousand steps if you don't have wings." He grinned. "I can carry you."
He let you in.
You'd half thought he wouldn't. Cassian had flown you to the wide balcony at the top of the House of Wind and then vanished with a wink, and you'd stood there in the cold mountain air with the whole city glittering below, and felt down the bond to the man on the other side of the glass doors, and known he knew you were there.
The doors opened.
His rooms were bare. A bed, made tight enough to bounce a coin on. A rack of weapons, every blade gleaming. One window looking down over Velaris. On the sill, alone, the little smoked-glass vessel you'd made for his shadows, with the silver threads rising inside it like smoke.
He was standing by the window in a plain dark shirt, his wings loose, and he looked like he hadn't slept in six days, which, you realized with a lurch, he probably hadn't.
"You shouldn't be here," Azriel said.
"Cassian brought me."
"I'll kill him."
"No, you won't." You stepped inside and let the door close. "Why are you hiding from me?"
He didn't answer. He looked at the glass vessel on the sill. Through the bond, you could feel him pulling back, trying to wall himself off, and failing, and the failure tasting like shame.
"Is it because of someone else?" you asked. It came out smaller than you wanted. You'd heard the gossip too. Everyone had. That the shadowsinger had loved someone in the High Lord's family for a long time and gotten nothing for it.
"No." The answer came instantly. He turned around. "No. Whatever that was, it was never this. It was me wanting something I'd decided I couldn't have, because wanting it was safer than having it." His jaw worked. "This isn't safe."
"Why not?"
He held up his hands.
In the lamplight, the scars looked worse. They looked like what they were, old and deep and permanent, the skin knotted and slick, the kind of damage that had been done on purpose and left to heal however it could.
"My family did this," he said flatly. "A long time ago. It doesn't matter how. It matters that I've spent five hundred years learning to keep my hands away from things that matter. I break things. I kill people for Rhys. I'm good at it. I don't sleep, I don't stay, I don't—" He stopped. "And you work with fire. With your hands. Every day. You make beautiful things out of heat, and when I touched you, I flinched."
You crossed the room.
He didn't back away this time. He went very still as you reached him, and when you took his scarred right hand in both of yours, warm as always, he made a small, raw sound, like something torn out of him.
"Tell me if it hurts," you said.
"It doesn't hurt." His voice was barely a whisper. "That's the problem. It doesn't hurt at all."
You turned his hand over. You traced the ridges of the old burns with your thumbs, slowly, with the same care you'd give a fresh piece of glass. Then you lifted his hand and pressed your mouth to the center of his palm.
The shadows came off him all at once. They poured off his shoulders and out of the folds of his wings and filled the room, and the lamp guttered, and you felt them wrap around you both, cool and close, holding on.
"You're not breaking anything," you said against his skin. "I'm the one who works with glass. I'd know."
He kissed you.
It was nothing like careful. It was six days of wanting, and five hundred years of not letting himself, all breaking at once. His hands came up to your face, rough and warm, and he kissed you like a drowning man takes a breath. You fisted your hands in his shirt and pulled him down, and he went, his wings flaring wide behind him, filling the small bare room.
"Tell me to stop," he said, breathless, against your mouth. "If you want to stop."
"I don't want to stop."
"The bond." He pulled back, just enough to see your face. His hazel eyes were dark, wild. "I don't want it to be the bond. I want it to be you. I need to know it's you."
"Azriel." You put your hands flat on his chest and felt his heart slamming against your palms. "I left honey buns out for your shadows for three weeks before that bond ever snapped. I made them a house. I've been in love with the way you hide from me since before I knew your name." You slid your hands up into his hair. "It's me. I want you. I'm asking."
The sound he made then was barely a word.
He lifted you off your feet, and you wrapped your legs around his waist, and he carried you to the bed with a shadow-soft grace that made it seem like you weighed nothing at all. He laid you down and followed you, and his mouth found your throat, your collarbone, the edge of your neckline, and he undid the laces of your work blouse one by one with his scarred fingers, slow, trembling a little, watching your face the whole time as if he expected you to change your mind.
You didn't. You arched up into his hands when they found your bare skin, and he groaned into your shoulder, low and helpless.
"You're so warm," he breathed. "Cauldron. You're so warm."
"Is that all right?"
"It's everything."
You got his shirt off and ran your hands over him, his chest, his ribs, the ridged scars on his shoulders where his wings joined his back, and when your fingers brushed the sensitive inner edge of one wing he shuddered all over and said your name in a voice you'd never heard from anyone. So you did it again. And again, slower, tracing the leathery span where it met his spine, until his hips rolled down hard against yours and his forehead dropped to your shoulder.
"Careful," he said, strangled. "Illyrians are— That's—"
"Sensitive?"
"Cruel," Azriel said into your skin. "You're cruel."
"You like it."
"Gods help me," he said, and he was laughing, actually laughing, a low cracked sound you could feel through the bond like light coming through a door, "I do."
He took his time with you after that. He touched you with those scarred hands like you were something he'd been forbidden and was finally allowed, mapping every inch of you, learning you with a spymaster's patience. He kissed down your stomach and settled between your thighs and looked up at you along the length of your body, his wings spread wide and dark over the bed like a canopy, and asked one more time, "Yes?" And when you said yes, he put his mouth on you and made you forget your own name.
You came with your fingers twisted in his hair and his shadows wrapped around your wrists, and through the bond you felt his answering wave of pure, astonished joy, so bright it almost hurt. He didn't stop. He drew it out of you again, slower, until you were trembling and pulling at his shoulders and begging him to come up here, now, please.
When he finally sank into you, it was with a long, shaking breath, his forehead pressed to yours, his eyes locked on your face. The bond went molten. You could feel everything he felt: the heat of you around him, the ache in his chest, the disbelief. He held perfectly still for a long moment, as if he were memorizing it.
"Stay with me," he whispered.
"I'm here."
He began to move. Slow, deep, deliberate, every stroke drawing you tighter, his wings mantling over you both until there was nothing in the world but the dark and the heat and him. You met him, and met him, and when he broke, he broke with your name in his mouth and your hands spread across his scarred back, holding on. Holding him there.
Afterward, his shadows settled over the two of you like a blanket, and for the first time in six days, the shadowsinger slept.
You lay awake beside him, watching the city lights through the window, feeling the bond hum between you, bright and steady and whole. Almost whole.
Because you knew, everyone knew, what came next. A mating bond wasn't accepted with sex. It was accepted with food: a female offering, the male eating from her hand.
And sometime before dawn, while you were still lying there, you felt the bond go suddenly, sharply cold, and Azriel's eyes snapped open in the dark.
"Something's wrong," he said. "Someone's in your studio."