Genevieve stood before him in nothing but her skin—and her wings. They shimmered as they unfolded, each feather laced with thin lines of silver and gold, veined with something ancient and pulsing like forgotten songs etched into flesh. The tips of her wings dripped with glamour, not like makeup but like sacred ink spilled from a forbidden book. The air around her grew warmer, sweeter… wronger. The temperature shifted as if she carried the season of midsummer inside her bones—too ripe, too lush, too much. Her scent—honeysuckle mixed with myrrh—curled around his senses like a spell spun in silk. She blinked slowly, revealing eyes with vertical pupils, flickering like candle flames. The glamour she wore before was gone, replaced by something raw and reverent. She stretched her wings lazily, joints crackling like bone and blossom, then laughed—soft and melodic, with an undertone that shimmered like glass about to break.
"If my father could see me now," she said, voice dipped in wine and mockery. "He'd say I was wasting my bloodline on you."
Viktor sat in the armchair, expression unreadable. The pencil in his hand hovered over blank paper.
Genevieve turned slightly, her body almost glowing—half bathed in firelight, half in her own shadow. Her wings twitched like a cat's tail, reacting to invisible currents in the room. Her veins shimmered faintly with starlight, her nails tapering into elegant claws tipped in shimmering gold. "I've gotten worse, haven't I?" she teased, her voice now layered with that unnerving melodic echo—like two women speaking at once.
Viktor didn't want to play her game. The moment was beautiful in the way a dying fire is beautiful. Or a knife—newly cleaned. But there was danger in it, too. The kind that smelled like jasmine and ozone.
This was the part of Genevieve no one painted. The part no sculptor captured. The fae didn't like honesty—especially not the kind that bled and stared back.
He remembered the kiss they'd once shared. How it made his chest hollow and his soul feel like it had bled through his skin. He hadn't meant to fall into it—she kissed like a secret dared to be spoken. But when he pulled back, the drain was immediate. Not just magical—but emotional. Like something had siphoned his marrow and left glitter in its place. It was more than the usual fae glamour. It was her. Feeding off his shadow. Sinking her magic into what curled just beneath his skin.
Sasha had warned him later, teasing but serious: "Brother, stop letting things kiss you just to see what it tastes like. Not every kiss is just a kiss when it's hungry."
Viktor had laughed then—half real, half wary. Laughed like maybe Ayoka might've been the same. Like maybe all women like Genevieve weren't in love with him but with the thing behind him. He wondered, just for a moment, if Ayoka really saw him, or if it was just the shadow she wanted too.
But when he looked at Genevieve now, part of him still asked—why her? Why did her shadow flicker like longing when he painted her? Even as his pencil refused to fall in love with it, her outline insisted. She didn't just want him. That was just decoration.
She wanted what haunted him.
The Shadow Man.
And Viktor wasn't sure which of them she was trying harder to seduce.
His thoughts unfurled slowly, painfully. He had once considered accepting her offer—to become her husband, for his brother's sake and the debt. It was a tempting offer. Genevieve—naked, glorious, monstrous—was the deal laid bare. Unlike Ayoka, who would struggle for acceptance in society due to her enslaved past, Genevieve had power, legacy, and influence. But that power came laced in venom.
She could erase Sasha's contract tomorrow. Her father controlled the bank, the courts, the debt itself. She could rewrite everything with the flick of a gold-stained quill, gilded in bribes and centuries-old pacts. But Viktor knew she wasn't here for him—not really. His family name only held so much weight in certain circles. And his estate? Built on dead land, deliberately so. A place her kind wouldn't flourish. Fey of her bloodline preferred blooming things—lush gardens, harvest moons, homes that breathed abundance.
But Genevieve wasn't like most fae. She was rot wrapped in petals, madness dressed in perfume. Where most fae longed for sacred groves, spring rites, and the ancient bindings of name and hearth, Genevieve wanted none of it. She didn't want roots or marriage—she wanted hunger, legend, and consumption. She was an echo of the older courts, the forgotten kinds—the ones who danced with wolves and courted storms. The kind whose promises were made in riddles and sealed with breath stolen from sleeping mouths. His shadow wasn't just a fascination to her. It was a delicacy. His shadow was her feast—and she licked the edges of it like honey off a blade.
Viktor saw it now more clearly than ever. Every time Genevieve smiled, she wasn't seducing him—she was beckoning to the thing that curled behind him. Feeding not on his affection, but on the whispering shadow that slithered through his spine and flickered in his dreams. When they had kissed, it hadn't been passion—it was consumption. He remembered how her tongue danced like she was drawing sigils in his mouth, how her magic scraped against his soul. She moaned for him, yes, but her pupils dilated not at his touch—but when the room grew darker, when his shadow stretched longer across the wall like it had a will of its own. She wasn't just kissing Viktor—she had been eating the essence that clung to him. He had to rinse his mouth with something holy afterward, something sharp and herbal, just to feel like himself again. And maybe that was why he hadn't touched Ayoka in days—because deep down, he feared the taste of Genevieve might still linger. But the feelings? They were gone now. Only the warning remained.
And he was glad he had waited. Glad he hadn't said yes. Because now he understood:
Genevieve didn't crave Viktor. She craved the thing that haunted him. And it had started to notice her back.
The shadow… that's what she was after. Her kind wasn't meant to touch it. Even back in the old days—when fae courts still mingled with kings and queens, when sunlight favors were traded for the blessings of crops or fertility—the shadow was forbidden. Only a rare caste of twilight-bound fae were allowed to study such things, and even they did so at a cost. The ones who dared dance too close to shadow magic often came back half-gone, their laughter brittle, their glamour cracked at the edges. Magic, like alchemy, obeyed strange but strict laws: bad input spoiled the brew, but too much purity? That could be fatal too. Light that burns too clean will leave no ash to study. Genevieve didn't care. She wasn't a high priestess of her court. She was the relic of a forgotten lineage—a feral heir dressed in opulence. And chaos? That was her ritual. Not order, not grace. But defiance laced in honey.
Genevieve was an experiment—half curse, half myth. If she knew Ayoka could summon his shadow with a moan, peel it off his spine with a cry, then she wanted that too. But not to share. To bind. To brand. She wanted to marry the nightmare that whispered in mirrors and slithered between candlelight and fear. Not Viktor. Never Viktor. Just what hunted beside him.
But the shadow had its own mind—and it watched her the way a beast watches something too curious for its own good.
Being Baba Yaga's granddaughter didn't just taint her blood; it sharpened her appetite. It gave her a legacy in handling darkness that most fae avoided like rot. She'd been cradled by bones and kissed by ash. She didn't just drink magic—she sucked it from marrow, coaxed it from haunted woods, pulled it from teeth offered in fairytales too grim to retell. He'd seen her cradle a vampire child, crooning to it in lullabies made from forest curses. Then she bit her own finger—not out of love, but to see if the child would flinch at the smell of iron. It didn't.
Neither did she.
No. He couldn't raise Malik anywhere near her.
The idea alone sent a shiver through him—not just fear, but revulsion. She didn't want his child out of love, affection, or the longing of motherhood. She wanted Ayoka's child—because that child had been claimed, seen, protected. She didn't ask to nurture it. She wanted to possess it. Twist the bond Viktor had forged into a knife she could hold.
And worse—she had looked at Malik once, really looked. Not like a child. Not like a boy with dreams and scraped knees. But like a key. A doorway. Like he was a tool she could shape, a vessel for something ancient. And she didn't even call him by name. She called him "it." Just like she once referred to Ayoka as "that thing you cling to."
She called it protection, but what she truly meant was ownership. Domestication. Or worse—a slow-roasted sacrifice offered to darkness under the pretense of legacy. She had even dangled Sasha's contract in front of him, tempting him with the idea of quick freedom. But it was never to marry him. It was never for peace. It was just a way to watch Ayoka break when something irreplaceable was stolen.
A child is not meant to be currency. Not even in fae courts. Not even under moonlight vows. And especially not for creatures like her.
In that moment, as he painted her wings and remembered Malik's tiny hands clinging to Ayoka's shawl, Viktor swore something silent but sacred:
He would protect them. He would hoard them. Not like possessions. Like treasure.
His treasure.
Ayoka would understand. She had to. She knew the cost of love when it had to be hidden, and the price of keeping something pure in a world that gnawed at it. Sabine might know pieces of it too, in her own quiet way—her spider-bound spells spun through generations of whispered warnings. But even her wisdom only went so far. She could see threads, yes—but not the entire web.
Only Viktor could feel the weight of this vow. Only he knew what it meant to guard a light so fiercely that even shadow dared not touch it.
Genevieve turned her head slightly, smirking. "You're not drawing."
Viktor sketched faster the moment she said it. "I am," he said quietly. He wanted this to be over.
She tilted her head, her wings twitching softly behind her. A shimmer sparked from her fingertips—a dusting of golden light released into the air like powdered promises. It floated toward him in lazy spirals, sweet-smelling and dangerous.
Old fae tales whispered of fairy dust used to sway the minds of mortal kings and make lovers forget who they were. A few grains could bend loyalty. A cloud of it could empty an empire. It was said to be gathered from the crushed wings of dream-drunk butterflies and stirred with stolen lullabies.
He could feel it trying to settle on his tongue, along his lashes.
She asked again, "Then what are you thinking about?"
He didn't answer.
Because he could hear his shadow whispering back.
And he was growing supremely annoyed.