Reborn (Shadow Beast Shifter, #3)(52)

Shadow nodded. “I haven’t truly feared another in two thousand years, not since coming into my powers and bonding with Inky, but my mother… She has me very aware of her presence. I don’t enjoy this new awareness.”

Unlike the rest of us, he wasn’t used to being the underdog.

“What happened to you in those first few moments after Dannie manipulated all of our memories?” I asked him. He’d told me bits and pieces, but there were a lot of missing details.

All the sex had kind of gotten in the way of the talking.

No. Regrets.

Despite the well-lit hallway, his face was awash in shadowy planes. “After we left you down in the caverns, I ended up in the castle, trying to figure out friend from foe. Most of my family was gone, but that didn’t mean there weren’t a ton of messes to clean up. In the midst of that, there…” His brow furrowed. “It was a swift wind that expelled everyone from the castle except me. The wind entered my mind, and maybe if I’d reacted faster, or had been more prepared, I could have fought her mind manipulation.”

He shook his head. “She took me by surprise, and everything went dark. When I came to, the sort of rage I’d never experienced before slammed into me. I vaguely remember burning buildings down and leveling mountains until my friends got to me. We were all confused, remembering each other but knowing that we’d been messed with. After that, my beast took over, and I destroyed everything I touched, including parts of the worlds and the Solaris System.”

My throat was tight, and even though I’d been the one to ask, I almost wished I hadn’t. Thinking about that time made me feel sick and broken. “Dannie was clever,” I rasped. “She didn’t take it all away; she just changed the narrative enough to get what she needed from us. I mean, Torin was waiting for me in Torma, and I was his true mate, so it was easy to slide me right into that life, leaving you free to rule the Shadow Realm, as you were meant to.”

If the cut of his jaw was any indication, he was not a fan of this reasoning. “She wasn’t that clever. She should have expected that neither of us would roll over into our new lives. You had no true history with Torin, and then to cover it all up by pretending that all of Torma had been locked in a stasis—”

“Which almost worked because you literally did have them locked in stasis for a while when we were in the Shadow Realm,” I reminded him.

And why the fuck was I defending Dannie right now? We weren’t in a school debate where I had to prove my point. Dannie had fucked us hard, sans lube, and we had every right to be angry as hell at her.

“What happened to your true mate?” There’d been no mention of Ixana and I wanted to know where that bitch currently was.

Shadow met my gaze, the gold in his eyes bleeding into red flames. “She had her memory wiped and ended up in Torma.”

It took me an embarrassingly long time to understand what he meant. And it wasn’t like he’d spoken in code or anything. It was just… fuck.

“What?”

He shook his head at me. “I won’t say it again, Sunshine. You heard me the first time.”

“You consider me to be your true mate now.” My words were slow and confused.

His scoff indicated that he was already annoyed with this line of questioning. “I don’t consider shit. You are my mate. Chosen and true. The bond between us would not exist otherwise and since both of us have two sides to our souls, it’s not even a far leap to understand how we’re bonded.”

I waved both hands in front of me, fairly certain he was insulting me again. “Far leap or not, it’s a huge step for you to make a statement like that, and I don’t need no ‘I won’t say it again’ bullshit, thank you very much, Shadow Bastard.”

His lips twitched. “How’s your ass feeling, Sunshine?”

My mouth went dry. “Uh, I mean, I’m all into sexy subject changes, but that one seems like a relatively extreme segue.”

His lips curved further. “It’s not as far a segue as you might think because if your smartass mouth doesn’t stop soon, I’m going to test out your ability to enjoy pain with your pleasure.”

I stepped into him. “Promises, promises.” I said that more than was probably healthy, but whatever. He apparently had no fucking clue how into this side of him I was.

His power wrapped around me, and I was dragged slowly up his body to receive a firm slap of his huge hand against my ass before he wrapped his fingers across the muscle and kneaded it. “We have to find your friend,” he told me softly, “and Midnight, and save the world. That’s the only thing that’s saving you from being tied to my bed for the next month.”

His hold on my ass tightened, and just when it was about to reach the level where I might have had to tap out, his other hand slipped down the front of my pants.

Oh, wait, I wasn’t even wearing pants because apparently his magic was that freaking awesome. It could strip me in a single thought. Luckily, we were still in the white hallway, without a bunch of onlookers to witness my destruction via orgasm.

Shadow’s fingers found my damp heat, sliding inside, and curling up to hit my G-spot. At the same time, the other hand on my ass stroked across my flesh.

I arched into him, the low heady feeling of a decent orgasm already building deep inside of me. “Shadow, please,” I moaned.