Page 85 of Cursed Shadows 2

Head bowed, inky strands of hair fall over his shadowy face, and he looks up at me from beneath his lashes. Pools ofmolten blue, his eyes are as unforgiving as a blade in a throat.

Under the death of his stare, I kick my golden sandals off and move to sit beside his outstretched leg.

“I didn’t want to waste more time looking for tavarak, so I just got these.” I hand him one of the bottles, and after a beat, realize he’s not going to take it.

With a huff, I set it aside and—after a few yanks—uncork my own. I’m some swigs in before I roll my eyes and my words come out in something of a whine, “A carriage rolled over on the road. We had to wait for the servants to push it back up.”

Kohl borders the deep ocean hue of his eyes. They watch me closely, consider me for a long moment.

“Then father insisted I shadow him for too long,” I add. “All I wanted was to come up here, to you.”

Daxeel doesn’t soften exactly, but he reaches out for the second bottle. He presses his thumb to the underside of the cork and it pops off from the pressure. If I needed any demonstration of his strength, that would be it.

“We did not finish our conversation,” he tells me, voice empty of the adoration I yearn for him to shower me with.

His words bring a frown to my brow. “What conversation?”

He drinks from the bottle, but I know he doesn’t like the sweetness of the honeywine. He’s not one for sugar. This is his offered branch, the bridge he builds in the gap between us.

“This,” he says with a jerk of his chin, but his eyes don’t leave mine. “I asked if you could leave it” —and he did, when he walked me back to my home after the human realm— “and you said you would miss it. You didn’t give a true answer.”

I stretch out my legs alongside him. Flexing my toes against the cool kiss of the air, I think on it a moment.

I only know this land. Licht is home and light is all I know. Even our nights have the moon and the stars. The dark lands don’t have any of that. But more, they have foreign trees that won’t wave their leaves at me in greeting. Gnomes are gone, and so I’m sure they have frightful creatures in their place, ones much more dangerous than any I can imagine.

Even their own females leave to be here with our kind. Whatsort of place must Dorcha be for their own folk to leave it in the masses?

On that thought, my answer comes, and I hope he doesn’t attack this evasion, “Everyone chases the light. Even your females.”

The look he runs me over with is darker than the far corner of the night sky. So he does recognize the evasion in my answer.

His annoyance is a smoulder.

‘You vex me.’

Cutting my stare to the hem of my golden dress, I add with a smile, “Eamon says your females are from nymphs, and that’s why they come here. Is that true?”

Daxeel drinks again, and the bottle is near empty with how easily he pours it down his throat. “You think my land is harsh, and that is why our females leave,” he decides, and his firm tone punches that it is not a question.

But I nod in answer all the same.

The tension in his clenched jaw loosens somewhat, even the shadows in his dimples soften. “They are not from nymphs,” he tells me. “It’s a common joke in Dorcha.”

At my frown, a silent question, his full lips twitch at the corner, an almost smirk. A temptation to thaw completely.

“Our females are able to take multiple husbands. It’s their bodies, it calls out to mate, to reproduce,” he says. “Some might take several husbands for this reason, the urge to reproduce, and to be offered different males for better chances. That is why it is accommodated within our laws and culture.” His smirk is firm before he adds, “And so the joke began with that.”

My frown remains intact. “Are they insatiable?”

He shakes his head slightly, and looks out to the roofs of the other towers.

I trace his gaze to Eamon and Fern, three roofs down. They don’t walk the tower length anymore, but now share a kiss under the moonlight.

Daxeel sighs and brings his harsh stare back to me. “Dokkalves are a difficult kind to reproduce. Most don’t makeit to birth, and many die at infancy. Females are hardest to create. And we lose so many of them in youth, or to your males with promises of the sun,” he says and his lip curls at the reminder of light males. “That’s the purpose of those rare marriages, to maintain our population.” His brow pinches before he adds, seemingly as an afterthought, “It’s the only reason it’s legal to wed human females.”

Not entirely dissimilar to our lands—wedding humans to validate heirs and offspring. But we don’t have group marriages. It’s a concept that I’m still not quite grasping.

I do wonder of the humans.

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