Page 27 of Cursed Shadows 1

This close to him, I see the onyx flecks in his ocean-blue irises. Those eyes gleam with hunger, a deep animalistic hunger for my body, and for my mind.

A contrast to the feral need in the way he watches me, his voice is cold and sharp with judgement as he teases me, “Then what will you do? Will you play the role of a pretty, common home wife?”

I bite down on my bottom lip. A mixture of silencing harsh words I might respond with, and the desire I wish to speak.

“If I ever learned how to cook, clean, and dote on some merchant for a husband,” I start, “or prepared myself for the monotony of marriage to a soldier… I might make a fine home wife, even if it’s common.”

His half smile bares only some of his white teeth, but I catch a glimpse of his sharp canines, and the reaction of my body is predictable. It never eases, the shiver of icy fear down my spine.

My body tells me to run from him, like a rabbit should run from a wolf. But other parts of my body are only excited by it all.

I find I quite like the fear, the danger.

I add, with a blush, “I’d make a fine home wife in a houseful of servants.”

His grin spreads, and it’s nothing less than predatory. All four of his piercing canines are revealed, all sharp enough to tear out my throat in one bite.

My belly stirs hot like a cauldron. The ache between my legs is building into a fire.

“Would you dance for your husband?” The same heat that lives in me for him is in his fierce gaze. He has me pinned with that look alone, and my mind flashes with thoughts, images, of me—dancing, slow and sensual, for him as my husband.

He sits in the shadows of a dark room, lounged in an armchair. He wears his leathers, and all of him belongs to the shadows, but not his eyes—the eyes that gleam like dangerous oceans as he watches me peel the straps of a lace bodice off my shoulders.

His head tilts to the side, as it always does when he considers me, and his leather gloves creak as he clenches his fists. How he aches to cut the bodice from my body, to hold me down, maybe a dagger to my throat as he—

I swallow, but it does absolutely nothing to douse the fire in my belly.

He can smell me. He’s dark fae. I know he picks up on my scent carried in the air, a scent that’s the need in me, a need for him.

“Yes,” I whisper. My cheeks are alight.

Like in my fantasy, his hand curls into a fist. But he pretends not to sense anything at all, and he offers me a small mercy. “But would you be a home wife or do you have other ambitions?”

“That’s a loaded question.”

Daxeel’s eyes run over my face as he studies every small detail of the blush on my cheeks. “Only if you’re uncertain of the answer.”

I lick my lips. His gaze darts to the motion.

There, his stare stays, even as I ask, “Are you so certain what you’ll do once you’re free of lessons and training?”

“Yes.” He watches my lips part around a breath. “I’ll take the role of an extractor.”

I pale and hope he doesn’t notice, but of course he does. He notices everything. An extractor is so much more than a warrior, it’s so much more lethal, violent. An extractor is just—

“A torturer,” I whisper the words.

My heart clenches around a fresh bout of icy dread, like my mind is just now realising who I’m with, what I’malonewith.

“I will like it,” is all he says, and finally lifts his gaze to mine.

“Why?” I ask, but I mean ‘how?’

He considers me for a moment. All that keeps pure silence from enveloping us is the steady rustle of those draped willow leaves around us.

“Why did you kill the spider?” he asks. “Why did you like it?”

So he knows I liked it and that I told a selective truth that it got too close. Luckily I didn’t lie, and he reads me like he would read any light one. A trickster of words.

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