Reclaimed (Shadow Beast Shifters, #2)(9)

“I agree.”

And I did. Shadow was a lot of things, most of them annoying as fuck, but he wasn’t a liar. Nope, he was more along the lines of a sneaky bastard.

When we got through the last of the onlookers—what was with all the Brolder animal asses taking up all the room in here?—we reached six broad shoulders. The kings of the Solaris System had formed a semi-circle around the door, blocking it completely from view.

Shadow and his merry band of assholes.

As if he’d felt my energy—or scented me—the beast turned, his eyes running across my features. No doubt copping an eyeful of one exhausted, hot mess.

“Sunshine,” he said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Get your ass into bed.”

Len, the silvery fae, opened his mouth, but a single dark look from Shadow had him backing off, both hands held up in front of him. His expression was all innocent, like he’d never think or say anything untoward or sexual in nature. We all knew better.

I ignored them both, choosing to speak with Reece, whom I felt might actually provide me with accurate information. “What’s happening with the door?”

He set those intense blue eyes on me, with their impossibly long eyelashes, and I swallowed hard. Shadow the second was too hot for his own good. Just like Shadow the first. “The spell is broken, but the door has not been used yet.” He shook his head. “How did you manage what the rest of us couldn’t in thousands of years?”

I shrugged. “I got pissed off?” Vast, epically vast, understatement. “Never fuck with a woman scorned, and all that jazz.”

There was a minute of silence, until Len started to laugh, which set a couple of them off. Even Galleli, with his gold wings tucked neatly against his back, cracked a smile. “Remind me never to upset Mera,” Lucien said with a chuckle. “Unless I want to find myself turned into a puddle of blood.”

Ignoring the idiots in the room, I focused on Shadow. “Are you done with me now?” The laughter died off, and there was no evidence of a smile on any one of their faces. I wondered if they’d misunderstood the intent of my question. “Will you send me back to Earth?” I pushed.

Shadow turned his huge body toward me, crowding closer, and I stood my ground so we were near touching. “Do you want to leave?”

I swallowed roughly, my body going haywire at being this close to him. We’d had that one night together in Faerie, and since then, life had been a shitshow, and I’d had no chance to really think about what had happened. But my body remembered. The way he’d buried his head between my thighs, his talented tongue that had brought me to orgasm more times than I could have imagined…

Shadow leaned right down so he could run his nose along my neck—unsurprisingly, this dude had a lot of shifter tendencies. “You smell delicious, Sunshine.”

He could scent my arousal; I didn’t bother to get embarrassed about it. But I did need him to focus. “Are you sending me back to Earth now that you’ve achieved your goal of getting into the Shadow Realm?”

My words were clipped and brittle. Maybe it was the reality of leaving hitting me hard, but all of a sudden, I was desperate to stay. I wasn’t done; there was so much more here that I had to explore.

He reached out and brushed back a lock of my red hair, his hold on the strands almost possessive. “Answer my question, Sunshine.” The low voice vibrated through me, settling somewhere… quite low. “Do you want to leave?”

“No.” The absolute truth of that was slamming through me with the force of a bullet. “I have so much more to experience and learn; I’ve only just gotten started.”

The hand holding on to my hair shifted, sliding farther through the long, somewhat tangled strands so he could gently tug my head back. Our gazes met with a searing connection, energy almost visible in the air. He was so much taller than me that immediately my neck ached, but as his strong fingers caressed my scalp, the last thing I would do was complain.

“I need to know what you are, Sunshine,” he said softly, and it almost sounded like a threat. “You’re not going anywhere until the mystery is unraveled. The fact that you broke a near two-thousand-year-old spell on a door when no one else could, tells me it’s in my best interest to unravel your mystery.”

“So I’m staying?” I confirmed.

“Yes. You’re still mine. For now.”

Relief almost crushed me to my knees—not that I’d ever admit that to the beast before me.

“When are you heading into the Shadow Realm?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’m not sure, but probably not today. I have some preparations to make first.”

“What do I do while you’re in the realm?”

A perfect smirk appeared on his face. “It’s cute that you think I’d leave you here unsupervised.” He shook his head. “Nope, Sunshine. You’re coming with me. We’re going to figure out your connection to my world if it’s the last thing we do.”

With those ominous words, he stepped aside, and I saw the Shadow Realm doorway for the first time. Gone was the black smoke, and in its place was a solid black door. The only black door in the library.

And apparently, I would soon be exploring this realm. A world that had not been visited by outsiders for thousands of years.

No problem.