Page 14 of Cursed Shadows 2

My bare feet flatten on the floorboards as I backstep across the bedchamber. Daxeel follows, his movements slow and lazy, but his watchful stare hooked onto me.

I only stop when my spine connects with the edge of the desk. It bites into my bones with the promise of bruises if I push back any further.

Daxeel stops, too. Then, finally, he tugs his attention away.

I loosen a breath, like an iron snake was coiled around my insides, and it suddenly evaporated.

He moves for the corner of the canopy bed. I watch the slinking of his muscles beneath the sweater as he crosses his arms over his chest, then leans back against the postered wood frame.

My tongue darts out over my lips. “I signed as her second.”

Head tipped forward, his eyes still gleam from behind shadows. He blinks, a slow and patient gesture. He says nothing, because I speak what he already knows.

I just can’t seem to find all those words I practiced earlier now that he’s here, watching me like a predator watches prey beg for its life.

For whatever reason I can’t fathom, he helps me out. The weariness still clings to him as he asks, “Why did you?”

I frown. “She needed one to enter. From within the family, the bloodline. It could only be me—”

“I know why it could only be you,” he cuts me off, his barbed, accented voice lashing at me like a razored whip. But it’s the following words that really make me feel small, how he enunciates them, and I feel like a child being scolded, “What I asked was why you signed.”

The darkness of the glower he runs over me, it reeks of disdain, and I know he judges me for signing my name.

Moronic, silly halfling.

“I… I didn’t think. Not for a moment did I believe this would happen. I… I didn’t let myself wonder what would become of me if anything happened to Pan,” and with no frown to pass his face, no tilt of the head, I know he follows my nervous ramblings. “Everyone thinks their older sibling is indestructible, right? Everyone thinks their father will protect them.”

The last thing I ever thought was that Pandora wasn’t drinking the potion and Ronan wasn’t eating the seed when she was about to enter the Sacrament. And the seed, the potion—those are absolute. No risk of pregnancy with those. It turns off fertility, extinguishes it like a candle flame in a hard gust of wind, so why,whydid this happen?

The thought of it riles me up so much that I want nothing more than to claw my careless sister to shreds with my own fucking hands. I hate her for it, that she risked my life for her ambitions that she fast abandoned. I’m a sacrifice.

I will die.

I will pay the price for her faults if Daxeel doesn’t help me.

No answer comes from him, not even in his body language, in his still-stony expression.

From this angle, the dim light of the bedchamber flickers over the tattoo that branches up the side of his neck. It glistens so deeply that it looks freshly done.

I smile, small and pained, but his unyielding stare gives me little hope. “I need help. I needyourhelp.”

It’s not shame that flushes my cheeks or whispers my voice; it’s defeat, premature, but obvious under his unflinching gaze.

I hang my head in his silence. My toes flex and curl and shift with my nerves. My hands find each other at my front, they wring together with each passing moment in this weighted quiet.

“You…” I start to break the silence. Looking up at him, I find his gaze wandering the length of my freshly lotioned legs, but he’s quick to fling it back up to me, and he’s now the one to wear a slight blush, one that creeps over his cheekbones.

“You know how to help me, don’t you?” I press. Spurred on by his lustful gaze, a bud of hope I didn’t have just moments ago.

“Yes.” The word is barbed in a growl. “The question—” he pauses and pushes from the bedframe collum. He reaches down for the bottle of honeywine fallen on the rug. He’s got it in his grip, uncorked, in a flash. “—is why would I help you, vicious one?”

In one step back, he finds his place at the bed again, and I wonder if he feels safer in this distance he’s keeping between us, or if secretly he’s hoping I join him over there, crawl onto the bed for him.

But other than the gentle rouge of his cheeks, he looks utterly unmoved by me, unaffected. And he rests his shoulder on the oak post of the bedframe. He leans his weight against it, boots crossed, and face like stone. He drinks my honeywine and I know he isn’t fond of the sugary taste, so he does it to rile me. But I’m fast distracted by something more than wine bottles.

His movements trigger something in me. I catch his scent—it carries the stronger tone of almond soap. Recently bathed.

I’m quick to figure it out. He washed up after training and changed into fresh clothes. Not for me. He did it for the whore in the harem.

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