The Shadow's Price
The coppery scent of blood was a perfume to the beast inside him.
It coiled in his gut, a serpent of living darkness that purred with every life he extinguished. Kaelen moved through the chaos of the besieged castle not as a man, but as a weapon. A wraith. The screams of the Regent's soldiers were a distant echo, the clash of steel a monotonous rhythm to which he danced his deadly dance.
His twin blades were slick, not with rain, but with the evidence of his work. Each fallen guard was a morsel for the Umbra, the ancient shadow bound to his soul. With every kill, he felt its pleasure, a dark, addictive warmth that simultaneously strengthened him and chipped away at the last remnants of his humanity.
More, it whispered in the back of his mind, a voice like grinding stone. More.
His mission was simple. The contract was clear: infiltrate Stonehaven Keep, find the target designated as the "Sun-Vine Scion," and extract her. Alive. The client had paid a king's ransom for this, and Kaelen never failed a contract. His survival depended on it.
He slipped past a trio of guards, a blur of black leather and lethal intent. They fell before they could even gasp, their throats slit by a shadow they never saw. The Umbra fed, and Kaelen's silver eyes, the only visible mark of his curse, flashed in the torchlight.
He found his target not in a hidden panic room, but in the heart of the castle's chapel. The air here was still, a stark contrast to the carnage outside. And there she was.
She stood before the simple stone altar, her back to him. A single shaft of moonlight from a shattered stained-glass window illuminated her, making her honey-colored hair seem to glow. She was not cowering. She stood tall, a slender, useless dagger clutched in her hand, pointed at the door as if expecting a common soldier to walk through it.
Foolish. Brave. He couldn't decide.
He stepped into the chapel, the sound of his boot on the stone floor unnaturally loud. She whirled around, and her emerald eyes, wide with fear and defiance, locked with his.
And the world stopped.
The Umbra, which had been a roaring inferno of hunger in his veins, stilled. The constant, gnawing whisper in his mind ceased. For the first time in a decade, there was silence. A profound, terrifying peace.
Then, a new sensation bloomed. It wasn't the urge to kill, to rend, to consume. It was something else, something far more dangerous.
Want.
It was a deep, primal pull toward the woman. Her very presence was a balm on the raw, burning wound of his soul. The light that seemed to emanate from her soothed the raging darkness within him. It was agony and ecstasy, the sweetest relief he had ever known, and it terrified him more than any battlefield.
The Umbra stirred again, but its whisper had changed.
Not to kill, it hissed, its voice filled with a new, terrifying craving. To possess. To own. To keep.
Kaelen froze, his blades hanging at his sides. The contract, the extraction, the gold—it all faded into insignificance. He was looking at the one thing that could calm the monster inside him, and the one thing the monster now wanted to devour whole.
Lady Sylanna "Syl" Verdant stared at the specter of death before her. He was all sharp angles and shadows, with eyes like polished mercury that saw straight through her. She expected him to strike. Instead, he just... stared.
"Are you here to kill me?" she asked, her voice steadier than she felt.
Kaelen didn't answer. He took a step closer, and the intoxicating, soothing effect of her presence intensified. It was like stepping into the sun after a lifetime in the cold.
He was the most dangerous man she had ever seen, a living weapon carved from night and violence. And yet, as he looked at her, Syl felt not the immediate threat of death, but something more complex. A desperate, haunted hunger.
Kaelen finally spoke, his voice a low rasp that seemed to scratch at the silence.
"No," he said, the word feeling foreign on his tongue. "The contract says alive."
But as he looked into her emerald eyes, he knew the real truth. The most dangerous part of this mission was no longer the Regent's army. It was the battle beginning within his own soul. Protecting her meant fighting the very thing that kept him alive. And losing that fight would mean destroying the only light that had ever made him feel human.