The Shadow's Captive

By Vesper Hale

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Length7h 35m

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Pearl-bright laughter cuts through the string quartet's latest waltz, and Morwenna Lark presses her gloved fingers against the stem of her champagne flute until the crystal warms. She finds him in the crush of masked nobility, near the eastern fountain where Lune and Nox's twin light spills through the stained-glass dome in intersecting beams of silver and violet. The Shadow envoy is wearing black velvet cut in the Silver fashion, a concession or perhaps a mockery, and his mask is simple obsidian, unadorned, which makes him impossible to lose in a sea of peacock feathers and gilded filigree. Drystan Vane. The name tastes like copper on her tongue. Lord Ashby's instructions had been precise. Midnight toast. Eastern alcove. He will have the Moontear Pendant in his coat, taken from the vault that morning, and if she exposes him the Lark name rises from the ash. It matters because her mother died screaming in the Misthollow borderlands and was found three days later with the Lark crest still warm against her chest. It matters because Aldric is sixteen, and wants the Silver Guard, and the only thing standing between her brother and a commission is a family name that has been rotting since the day that body came home. So she does it. She accuses a Shadow Court envoy in front of the entire Silver Court. He does not deny it. He spreads his arms and asks that the lady search him herself. *Go on, Lady Lark. Find what you're looking for.* Inside his coat there is a monogrammed silk handkerchief. Nothing else. A hundred people watch her pull it out because she has to. The pendant is real. It is simply not where she was told it would be, and when it finally hits the marble it has come out of somebody else's coat entirely. *You were given bad information, Lady Lark. The real thief planted the evidence on you, knowing you'd be desperate enough to use it.* By the time the laughing stops, Ashby is gone from the hall with her mother's pendant, Prince Caspian has found his evening's entertainment, and the man she just tried to ruin has told her something about how her mother actually died that she was never meant to hear. She has burned what was left of her family in one evening. The only person in either court willing to tell her what she was really being used for is the one she accused. This is a dark fae fantasy romance between two courts that have never trusted one another: an envoy in obsidian, a disgraced daughter with nothing left to lose, a border where light burns the wrong kind of blood, and a thing called the Gloomfeast that does not negotiate. The heat is closed door.

Royalty Romance Magic Enemies to Lovers Political Intrigue Fated Mates Mystery Hidden Identity Epic Quest Betrayal Supernatural Family Thriller Hopepunk Grief Dark Fantasy