Page 154 of Cursed Lifeline

His eyes rise and sternly find mine.

“Goodbye, Esmerelda,” he frowns as another man approaches.

It’s one of Felix and Viktor’s kindwhostands by snarkily, staring at us in our final moment together. Stuck in the center of a cement tunnel I’ve been held prisoner in, Alfred gives me a sad, hopeful smile.

“Goodbye?” I stammer, shaking my head. “What do you mean ‘goodbye’ Alfred?”

“They’re ready for you, slayer,” the stranger calls.

Alfred starts to walk away, but I grab him one last time in an attempt to stop him. I close my eyes and swallow over tears as emotion rises in my throat. Shaking my head, I whisper, “He promised this time would be different, Alfred, and I believed him.”

Opening my eyes, I catch my watcher’s sad stare.

“Your love with Felix has always been teetering on the edge, Esme,” with a soft smile, he starts to walk away, and I reluctantly let him go. “From the first time you saw each other, you both couldn’t help but fall into a hopeful purgatory that suspended you in empty fulfillment. Maybe what you both needed all along was to jump, not fall. Give in, and don’t hold back. Yet you’ve always been afraid to, for fear of what it might do to one another.”

“Slayer,” the man demands, but I keep my attention on Alfred’s retreating form.

“The secret lies in trusting and embracing whatever happens after the fall,” he says as he strides further down the tunnel and out of sight. He looks around him as if he’s slightly terrified and then recites a line Felix once said to me over two hundred years ago, “Though this is madness, yet there be method in it.”

I watch his back for a few more moments, thinking maybe he’ll look back and give me one final farewell glance. But he doesn’t, and the words he speaks haunt me from a book I read several lifetimes ago. They don’t soothe. They worry me because every main character dies at the end of Hamlet. After a moment, I slowly turn around to meet the stranger’s stare. He motions angrily over his shoulder, gesturing towards what awaits me down the tunnel.

With my head held high, I walk confidently towards a fate I’ve been running from my whole life.

Confident I know who waits for me at the center of the ring, I take a deep, calming breath.

He’s a man who long ago promised me I’d always be safe with him.

If he’s really my competition, I know that’s a promise he's finally going to keep.

Fifty Six

Felix

song: love is a battlefield | j2, chelsea caroline

The crowd cheerslouder as I take my last step into the center of the ring. Turning around, I catch the eyes of my brother. Beside him, a brunette with light brown eyes grins mischievously. Viktor looks at the woman and swallows hard before giving me a curt nod.

Ignoring the warning in my gut about the girl at his side, I give him the same in return.

This ends tonight.

For all of us.

A flicker of movement catches our eyes across the arena, and Ember steps into the light like royalty, ready to hand out a final decree.

Viktor’s underworld proved successful in tempting her here.

Once word spread that he planned to set up a match between myself and the slayer in his underground coliseum, we hoped the witch of darkness wouldn’t be able to stay away. We played the arranged fight off as a penance, an atonement I needed to pay for loving the enemy to our kind. As we venture further into this controversial plan, my heart slightly settles noticing it worked.

Ember’s presence isn’t entirely shocking, seeing as we planned for and hoped for as much. But what startles all of us, is the company she keeps as Evangeline flanks her right side and stands confidently next to the enemy.

I look at Viktor and see his confidence slip for a moment. We didn’t prepare for this. Not only that, but I sense the oath, the pull on my brother as both women glance across the way and lock eyes with him might prove fatal for at least one of the parties involved this evening.

Viktor raises his glass of bourbon in a cheers to Ember and Evangeline. The laughs, ridicule, and screams of excitement over Esme’s impending death make me sick as Esme starts to step into the center of the ring. She eyes me timidly, moving slowly to meet me in the middle.

Once we are toe to toe, the vampire who ushered her in says, “Pick your choice of weapons.”

Esme stares at me with wide eyes.

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