Page 80 of Cursed Shadows 2

I hold steady under his stare. “It’s obvious to anyone paying attention.”

A heartbeat passes, then another, before he asks, voice like a steel blade, “And what exactly is obvious?”

“You like her.” I wipe at a dried crimson path on my eyebrow. “Maybe you love her, I don’t know. But you don’t do anything about it, even though she looks at you the same.”

He grunts ahmphsound, scratchy and a bit growly.

We pass my favourite tree, where I sit with Eamon sometimes. The Gilded Glade. We’re closer to the garrison now, and I wonder how long we’ve been walking, how long those pauses have been between our shared thoughts.

We walk a while longer in silence, so long that I don’t think he’ll speak again before he leaves me in the courtyard. But he does, and it startles me enough to lift my brows and part my aching lips—

“I had evate once.”

I stare at the darkness ahead.

Rune’s voice lowers into something…sad, “She was a whore. I met her at a brothel long ago, when I was a training warrior living in the barracks.” His throat bobs. “I saw her in the lineup and experienced evate. I left. I am a warrior.” I hear the compressed scoff in his tense words. “I am a chosen soldier by a high warlord. I have fought for my life since my low birth. And I just turned—and ran.”

I aim my slack look at his sharp profile. All the questions swarming my mind come out in a whooshed breath, but they don’t form.

“It was the first time in my life I was ever truly afraid. I panicked,” he adds with a grim smile, bitter and strained. “I returned for her the following Quiets. But she was gone.”

Now I hear it. It echoes in my mind.

‘Ihadevateonce.’

“What happened to her?” My voice is hushed against the stagnant air, but he hears me.

“She figured out what it was—what she was to me. Not always a welcome fate to our females. Many fear it, for good reason,” he adds and turns a dark look on me. “So she fled, knowing I would return to take her. I hunted her for almost a week. All the way to the Wastelands.”

The breath shudders out of me just as a twist of nausea tugs in my chest.

She must’ve tried to get to the light lands where Rune wouldn’t find her, because we would have hidden her, and Rune wouldn’t survive against the sun to reach her. And the laws would have prevented him from trying.

But to cross between our two lands means to go through the Midlands or the Wastelands.

Beasts live in the Wastelands.Ferals. Unevolved type of fae, cannibals and beasts. No language, no homes, no minds. Pure beasts.

They say we came from them, that they are the first fae—but I shudder to think of those things being the animals within our males, especially the dark ones.

Then there’s the wastelanders.

I wouldn’t know the difference between them and the ferals if I was ever unlucky enough to meet either. But the wastelanders are different. Males born dokkalf, but something happens to them as they grow through their youth. Their rage is stronger, their violence fiercer, bloodlust insatiable. And before they mature, their tantrums can destroy entire villages. There’s no stopping it. So the ones who aren’t killed by their parents or neighbours are the ones abandoned in the Wastelands where the ferals roam. Then they themselvesbecomeferal.

I think it’s a sad fate. A sickness maybe.

And I can’t fathom the fear that Rune’s evate must have felt out there in that barren land of darkness and beasts.

“I’m sorry for her,” I confess a truth, because I know the fate he’s implying his evate faced. The beasts got her.

“The bond wasn’t forged,” he says, but there’s noreassurance in his distant voice, because he adds, “yet she was still evate. And I feel the loss of her always. That is how I know she wastheone, not a passing experience. She was the other piece of my soul—and now there is a hole in my chest, it always aches. I felt it the moment I stepped into the Wastelands. I was too late.”

I have no words for him, nothing more than sheer pity for his pain, for his loss. His mistakes cost him dearly, and if she were just an evate experience with no true mateship beyond that, then he wouldn’t feel her loss so gravely. He wouldn’t feel it in his soul.

She was his one—and she is dead.

What can I say to that?

“Aleana,” he starts, and his expression hardens with his tone, “deserves evate from a good male, deserves a male who is hers wholly—not one who yearns for a deceased female and will unite with her in the afterlife.”

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