Shadows and Shade Box Set

by Amanda Cashure

  “You don’t get to shape the facts. I can sleep with whoever I want,” I shout.

  And the instant I hear my own voice, I regret it.

  Seth drops down out of his tree.

  “I don’t know how this started,” he says. “But that’s the wrong thing to say to our Alpha.”

  “I don’t care.” I try to keep my voice even, but all I manage to do is muffle my words until they come out like a growl. “I’m not your toy,” I say, waving a hand toward Seth but keeping my gaze on Pax. “Or your shadow.” I point at Killian. “Or anyone's pet.” I point at Roarke. “And I’m damned sure not your property.” I point at Pax, poke him, actually.

  He wraps my hand in his and holds it in place. Tight enough to hurt. As he steps forward, I step back until he’s walked me into a tree and pinned me against it. He’s taller than I am, and he maintains his full height, looking down with his eyes glowing.

  I can’t move, tree behind me, Pax in front of me, and my hand being bruised in his grip. As if I’m not already blocked in, he presses his other hand against the tree, next to my head.

  The bones in my hand begin to creak, and I let out a hiss. I’ve seen this guy crush metal in his palm, and a bolt of fear shoots through me at the prospect.

  “Pax,” Killian says loudly, but no one moves.

  Pax opens his mouth to speak, and I watch as his canines slowly extend into the kind of thing found in a wolf’s jaws. A really big wolf.

  That’s new.

  “We’re not discussing this again.” His words are accompanied by a low growl that rolls up from deep in his chest.

  He doesn’t move, though, just stares at me like he’s waiting for an answer.

  I close my eyes against the pain and just try to breathe. Finding words when someone has you pinned and hurting is hard. Everything in me is saying, just wait until it’s over.

  Pax growls, loud and sharp and forcefully. The tree shudders, and a wood-splintering crunch fills my ears. Then he’s gone. The heat from his presence sucks even the warmth from my own body away, leaving me with a cold chill.

  At first, I don’t move.

  Then slowly I open my eyes and uncurl my fingers before taking a shaky step away from the tree. There’s a chunk missing from the thing. Pax literally ripped it out with his bare hand.

  My hand, however, feels numb, and I wriggle my fingers to try and get the blood flowing again.

  Pax is nowhere to be seen. Roarke shoves the last of the medical supplies back into a bag, and Killian pulls his shirt down into place. Seth approaches me, leading my horse over.

  “Where’d he go?” I ask, softly, a little afraid that Pax is going to reappear at any moment.

  “To blow off some steam. Did he hurt you?” Seth gazes down at my hand, and I wriggle my fingers again to assure him they’re all intact.

  “Don’t tempt the guy. MateBonds aren’t supposed to work like this –”

  I cut him off right there. “Mate? He’s not a Brahman bull, and I’m not a cow.”

  The guy doesn’t even crack a smile – which is the complete opposite reaction to what Seth should have. So I suck in a shaky breath and search for something better to say.

  “We weren’t talking about mating. We were talking about sex, and he was telling me I never get to have any, which is not how I plan to live my life.”

  He cocks an eyebrow at me.

  “What?” I demand.

  “Let me explain this to you,” Roarke says, striding over to stand next to his brother. “AlphaSeeds were the original Silvari rulers. All Seed bloodlines are kept pure because only two parents of the same Seed can pass on the gift. Alphas only mate with Alphas. They have almost no say over who their mates will be. Not like instant love, but an unbreakable bond. It worked fine when there were a hundred or so different families. Over time they joined the long list of extinct Seeds. Our mother found two, hidden in different parts of the –” he hesitates, before deciding on, “– world, their powers suppressed for generations. Pax as a young man, and years later, Jessamy.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She died of a broken heart,” Seth says softly. “Before Mother died and Lithael usurped the throne. Before assassins started removing council members, and the grimm were pulled through the Veil to lock down the Black Castle. Before we were sealed into the White Castle and kept caged.”

  “Before all of that, Pax married her,” Roarke says, cutting to the point. “Jessamy was with child, and someone paid a CataclysmSeed to make all of that go away. CataclysmSeeds were rare, but those that were still alive had become weapons for hire. They’ve the power to make anything they touch dissolve. With one touch, the baby was… well, dissolved... a few weeks before she was due to be born.”

  I choke, a cold, hard fist squeezing at my heart.

  Roarke continues, “Pax hunted them down. Killed all of them he could get to. I was there that day, on the other side of the market. I saw the woman who brushed her hand over Jessamy’s stomach and ended everything. I traced her to the Hyll family line, but Pax had already been there, and the bodies that were left behind… nothing could be made of their faces. He’d always been a bastard to live with. His power has an innate need to classify people as either his or other. If you’re his, then he needs to protect you.”

  “Becoming a part of his pack took me two decades and drove Mother mad,” Seth says. “I slept in a glorified cellar for twenty years because the bastard couldn’t stand the smell of me in the house. I did take a lot of pleasure in finding particularly rotten things to line my clothes with, though. Probably didn’t help.”

  “What happened next? After he lost Jessamy?” I ask. This guy can get seriously off track.

  Seth shrugs. “He went back into the Saber ranks, and we all went back in with him.”

  The information tumbles through my scattered mind. I focus on parts of Roarke and Seth’s revelations, and the sparse details that I’d gathered before today, to distract me from feeling pain and sympathy. Not because I don’t care – but because Pax just walled me in, ripped the tree apart, and threatened me with lifelong virginity.

  “You’ve said before that he shares his bed with plenty of women. If he gets to have sex, then so do I,” I grumble, heat flashing in my cheeks as my words sink in. So I blurt some more stuff out to try to fix it. “I don’t even want to have sex, but I don’t want to be told by him that I can’t.”

  Seth’s smiling like I’m his toy again.

  “He’s slept with plenty of women, you’re right. Sabers – Silvari wouldn’t survive – but to him they were all other,” Roarke says.

  “You two get to have sex, right?” I demand.

  “You want to have sex with us?” Seth asks, his eyes so alight with amusement that I have to warn myself that slapping him is only going to hurt me, not him.

  “No, shut up. No, I mean if you guys being with other people doesn’t worry him, then he can just get over the idea of me being with someone else.”

  This is ridiculous. I don’t even have a ‘someone’ that I want to get into bed with!

  “I don’t pretend to know what’s going through his mind,” Roarke says. “He didn’t take as long to accept me as Seth. I was seven, and I spent three years sleeping in a cot on Mother and Father’s floor, but it took you minutes.”

  “What do you mean it took me minutes? I’m not actively trying to sleep with the man. That wasn’t even the point of our conversation.”

  “It took minutes for him to break you free from Martin’s chain,” Roarke says.

  “That was his fault,” I say, pointing at Seth, because it was Seth who originally stepped in and saved me from the death grip that Lord Martin had on my throat.

  “I saw you as a shiny new toy – Pax was right about that,” Seth says. “And if I’d chosen anyone else, he would have let me play my games.”

  I scowl at the man, hating that his lopsided smile is dimpling, just one of his cheeks, and taking away some of my reactio
n, because playing with people should not be okay. But against my own judgement, I let that slide. What he’s talking about is practical jokes, a dash of humiliation, and the end result being me in the stocks. We’ve already been there.

  “How does this have anything to do with –” The right words elude me so I resort to waving my arm around and growling.

  “Silvari,” Killian says, and we all turn to listen. “Grow up with their families. They go into service for fifty years, then return home. They marry, have kids, go to universities, and bicker over the best professions and the best meaningless jobs. Their lives are hollow. Sabers grow up with their families, then get called to the White Castle to train and eventually fight and protect the realm.”

  He stops talking, but I keep my gaze on him, waiting for the important part. The guy never says anything unless it’s important.

  “If someone dies, the triune is broken and the surviving members become inactive. Sometimes they fight their way into posts as guards, or eventually get offered positions as Master Apprentices – maybe one day becoming Masters. The only other thing that allows a Saber to leave their duties is love.”

  “Love? Or this forced mate thing?”

  Roarke shakes his head. “Only Alphas have MateBonds. A few other Seeds develop their own kinds of bond connections. The uncontrollable, instinctive, deeper than magic kind. A mate is the one other person who will stop our souls from searching.”

  “The rest of them just fall in love and get married and try to make it work,” Seth adds.

  “Seeds who form bonds can only do so with a perfect match of their own kind. When there’s no more of your kind, you can still hope for love and marriage.”

  “Which is harder for the Seductions,” Seth says, pulling a face at his brother.

  “Chaos and Trickeries make a mess of things just as much as we do.”

  I set my glare on Seth first, making sure his vibrant blue Chaos eyes meet mine before I ask, “You’ve been married?”

  “Not married, but in love – sure. I’ve left six times, but they weren’t true bonds.”

  “That’s impossible for you, Seth,” Killian adds, a smirk on the corner of his lips.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  I’ve yet to find a ‘one time’ love – and yet at the same time, I’m falling for four of them at once. Four guys with three hundred years of experience. They have pasts. They’ve had lovers, even wives. Of course!

  And of course they’re not going to like me in return because magic has a loophole to keep them locked down to their own kind.

  “Didn’t work out,” Seth says, interrupting the Seed of Dumbass growing in my chest.

  Roarke runs his thumb over his short beard as he talks. “Well, you did steal that horse from the Royal Races on your first official date with Illwyn and left her to take the blame. Was that in the middle of you two being intim–”

  Seth cuts in, “–Roarke has had ten partners and three wives.”

  I gasp, and have to press my lips together to stop my jaw from dropping.

  “What happened? Were they all, ah, bonds?” I manage.

  “No, nothing that special. They just didn’t work out,” Roarke says, running his hand through his hair and avoiding eye contact.

  “Doesn’t help that you had some of those partners while having some of those wives. Plus almost draining the life–” Roarke sets his gaze on his brother, and Seth shuts up mid-word.

  I turn to Killian.

  He doesn’t even answer me, just grunts and walks away.

  So I turn back to the other two. “And Pax?”

  “Once,” Seth says. “More than two hundred years ago.”

  I grit my teeth. Now is not the time to feel sorry for Pax, and I’m not going to let this go. These guys might live for a thousand years – I will not. I’m going to get a normal human’s fifty or so years and then be too old and broken to care much about love.

  “He can still get over it,” I say. “He’s made it pretty damned clear that intimacy stops at making sure my clothes smell like pack, and that’s it. What I do with my body is my decision.”

  Seth looks at me with a hint of sympathy, then he grabs a stick and draws a line in the dirt. A line with a dot either side of it.

  “This is Pax, this is you, and this line is his stubborn Alpha impulses. You need to stay as far away from that line as you can.”

  I groan, because I’ve done some really stupid crap over the past week, including dropping my towel in front of them all.

  Stuff that crosses lines.

  And at the same time longing unfurls itself inside me because being near Pax feels good. The idea of belonging to him makes my core melt.

  In the background, Killian rinses his mouth out with water, then climbs into his saddle. With a gentle clicking noise, the horse kicks into a canter, and they’re soon out of sight. Roarke and Seth start to move toward their own mounts, and I get the picture.

  “Does this mean you rescind your previous ultimatum?” Roarke asks.

  We did have a deal, what feels like a long time ago now, when I got stupidly jealous of their gorgeous female servants and demanded they request guys instead. Around the same time, I learned that Elite Saber and mortal interactions always ended in mortal deaths. That fact isn’t new to me. I did order them not to have any guy/girl interactions at all – unless they were in mortal danger and the interaction ended in death.

  That whole deal wasn’t supposed to develop into my permanent virginity.

  “Sure,” I say, not wanting to be the one laying out rules for them the same way Pax is laying them out for me. “After me. New deal, no one gets any sex until I do.”

  As soon as I’ve said it, I regret it. Deep, devastating regret. Partly because discussing my sex life was at the bottom of my to-do list today, but mostly because the idea of any one of these guys being in the presence of any other woman makes it hard for me to breathe.

  It’s followed sharply by the realization that I can’t compete. Like Pax said, I might be able to share a bed with a regular Silvari – might. Sabers are out of the question. Elite Sabers like these guys are so far out of my league I might as well be considering learning to chuckin’ fly.

  Seth steps up behind me.

  “Need help?” he asks.

  I glare at the stirrup, the saddle, and the short horse that were acquired for me seconds before we raced from the castle. Running my fingers over the bandage on my broken arm, I curse two things – that I suck at anything other than washing dishes and that I break so easily.

  Because if I were to be honest, I don’t just want to be close to Pax. I want all four of them.

  And that’s about as crazy an idea as a soot-servant girl can have.

  They’re stuck with me, a potion gone wrong, and some cryptic message left by their mother that has put me into their lives. Stuck. And maybe they need me. Maybe they’re good people, and they treat me better than I ever have been – bruises and all. But ultimately, they’re right – I’m not the kind of person who’s going to live for very long in this realm.

  Surviving should be my number one priority. Not sex, and not pushing Pax over the edge.

  My world is Darkness. I live with it. I’m good with that – I’m good at it.

  Choosing the light in the dark takes strength.

  Choosing to stay in the dark breeds evil and ash and death. Killing or wishing to be killed. Suffering and the infliction of it.

  Pax is by the stream, prowling in his wolf form. The wolf hasn’t walked for so long, I’d almost forgotten the way the gold shines underneath his coat like his skin is metal, and it’s mixing and melting before my eyes. Being revealed in glimpses under his coffee and ash fur.

  He swivels sharply, snapping and making my horse skip backward. I dismount, tie the horse’s reins hastily to a tree, and approach him on foot.

  He goes back to pacing, turning to look at me every five or ten steps, growling and showing canines. All teeth and all bit
e.

  I let out a sound in comradery, sensing that every snap of his jaws is actually him angry at himself. Angry at the voice of the wolf coming alive inside him.

  Arms crossed over my chest, I stare past him at the tree line on the other side of the stream. Something dark settles itself uneasily into the pit of my stomach. Something we’re riding toward – and that wants us to ride toward it.

  A flash of light engulfs the wolf, and Pax is left in its place.

  I grab a set of clothes from my bag and toss them at him. They’re big, but he needs to be clothed if the boys catch up – if the girl catches up.

  “Hm?” I ask.

  “Leave it,” Pax grumbles.

  I glare at him, giving him a second.

  “It can’t happen,” he says.

  “Already is,” I grunt.

  He leaps at me, trying to stand over me, with his fist clenching the collar of my shirt, and his eyes glowing with furious magic.

  “What do you know?” he demands.

  Knowing isn’t really something I do. I do feeling. I feel their needs, feel their pain, feel their wants. I feel his ache. The way any distance between him and the girl is beginning to gnaw at him. Not just him – Roarke and Seth are the same.

  The girl has no idea. She still swings between feeling safe and afraid.

  Afraid is good. She needs to be afraid.

  “We have to get rid of her,” I say.

  He slams his fist into my stomach, sending me flying back into a tree. I grunt on impact, slipping to the ground before beginning to pull myself to my feet. He doesn’t advance on me, returning to pacing and looking like he’s on the verge of going wolf again.

  “We need to reverse this potion and put her somewhere safe,” I try again, stalking toward him. This time, I’m ready to be attacked. “You can’t let these bonds seal. If your power claims her as a mate, she will not survive long.”

  “I know that.” Frustration leaks into his voice, and a touch of pain laces through the threads that reveal his heart, but all body language screams of rage. “I’m not going to touch her.”

  “You don’t have to touch her to get attached.”