Page 67 of Cursed Shadows 1

“I want my brother happy, and I want, selfishly, to keep you.” She shrugs, and even that is a mix of grace and exhaustion. “So you know, don’t you, what you must do?”

Discreetly, I lift my hand to wipe at my cheeks. If Eamon looks over at us, I don’t want him seeing the tears.

The cool touch of her fingers grazes my knuckles, as though she means to comfort me. “You understand enough of our kind to know what you must do. Let him conquer you, punish you, let him balance the scales,” she adds in a desperate whisper, leaning closer until our noses touch and her eyes are reaching into my writhing soul. “Then find your happiness again.”

“And what’s in it for you?”

Her sly smile tugs into a toothy, dazed grin. “Litalves and their ulterior motives. Makes you all so untrusting.”

“But of course you have motives,” I say plainly. We all do. In everything we do, we each have a motive.

“I told you. My brother’s happiness,” she reminds me. “And a sister gained.”

If I have any response to give her, I can’t speak it. I can’t so much as think it before Samick sets an empty bottle down on the coffee table, a bit too hard.

It draws in my attention, but not Aleana’s.

I look to Samick, watch as he turns his cheek, then I trace his gaze—right to Daxeel and Rune who come in from the opened doors.

The moment his ocean eyes find mine, his mouth twists. He’s displeased to see me here, in the Hall. Usually, I’m on the tower. Maybe he feels I’m encroaching on his territory.

But whatever his thoughts are, he dismisses them for a full bottle of tavarak he snatches from the coffee table, then falls back into an armchair. Rune sprawls out on the sofa.

And Daxeel pays me no more mind. It’s as though it never happened, that brief moment of understanding out at the battle blocks, like no part of those realizations softened him to me.

Daxeel ignores me entirely.

No matter what Aleana says, it doesn’t change that Daxeel has a heart of stone laced with ice when it comes to me. And if I take her advice, it will be a journey of my own heart aching under his punishments—all for the feeble hope that he might one day forgive me.

So many ifs and maybes.

The first night I danced and he watched, I wonder if we had known then what we know now, what we would have done differently.

Might I have cut my stare to the throngs of folk in the crowd? Would I have watched the blades of grass devour the ants that dared crawl there?

And him…

Would he have cut me down as I danced?

He should have.

And I should have run.

14

††††††

I’ve only just stumbled my way out of the Hall, reeking of honeywine and leaving behind Eamon who’s passed out on the couch, and Aleana who snores on the armchair.

The others are still there to watch over them.

Though I stumble every other step, the heels of my boots not quite cooperating with me, I’m not as drunk as them. So I trust myself to drag my way through the dim, quiet corridors to my bedchamber.

But it’s when I turn down the stair’s landing to the quarters that I start to feel how quiet it is. The corridor conducts the energy of the outside. The darkness isn’t just the loss of light as the sun sets, it carries something in it, something predatory. I feel it like claws scraping down my spine, the burn of its sentient gaze on me. That’s how it feels—sentient.

My skin prickles but I push on for the hallways ahead, where my room is tucked into litalf quarters. Candles flicker ahead, I see them, but each step feels less like heading for the light and more like heading into a trap.

Then… there it is.

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