Page 90 of Cursed Shadows 2

My chemise catches between my freshly lotioned legs as I close the distance between us. His stare never wavers as I advance, and his hand doesn’t lower.

I almost rest my palm on his, reach for him, but he stops me. He changes course. With a pushed step forward, he moves for me, and his fingertips come up to my cheek. There, he ghostshis touch over the purple bruise shining on my cheekbone.

A frown knits his brow.

As he studies the faint edges of the bruise, his head tilts to the side, and his jaw clenches tight enough that his teeth might shatter.

Then his eyes drop, and I feel the weight of them land on my mouth. A slight swell of my lip, a healed cut, scabbed and sore, that he shifts his focus to.

The balms have made good work on my wounds.

But Daxeel’s frown digs deeper into his brow as he rubs the pad of his thumb over the cut, like he wants nothing more than to wipe it away.

Not once does he ask what happened.

So I know, “You talked to Rune.” My voice is soft in the dark.

He drops his hand to my wrist, and his fingers coil tight. His grip is firm, commanding, and so is his gaze that he pins me with.

That look alone has me melting.

I’m a puppet now and he holds my strings.

He says nothing as he reaches back for the door. He leads me into the bedchamber, its dusty light from the few glowjars still scattered around. I tuck most of them away in the wardrobe during the Quiet, but some are still littered around the room, like my discarded stockings and the lingerie I threw aside some phases ago and never picked up.

Never thought I would miss Knife.

As though they are weapons on a battlefield, Daxeel moves around my litter of clothes and boots and sandals and books. He guides me to the bed and, with his hand slipping to my middle, gently pushes me onto the mattress.

To say there’s no lust in how he looks at me before he reaches back to the scruff of his sweater and tugs it off, would be a lie. There’s always lust in the way he watches me.

But this Quiet feels different.

He’s not here for sex.

He doesn’t need to tell me that. I know it, I feel it. Maybethat’s the bond we share now, a sense of intentions I’m picking up on like it’s a faint echo of something I feel. I don’t know exactly.

But I trust it. And I scoot onto the farther side of the bed, then rest my cheek on the pillow.

I watch as he strips down to nothing—and I give the evidence of his lust a lingering look before he lifts the furs and climbs in beside me.

He drapes his arm over my middle like a weight to keep me in place.

I shimmy closer and nuzzle into his solid chest. “Don’t say anything,” I mumble against his bronzed marble chest, my lips moving over the inky lines that spear across his flesh. “Just let me speak.”

His answer is silence, but his head lowers to press his lips to my hair, and I feel cocooned again.

“I love you,” I whisper. “I know you love me too, but you won’t say it back. Just…” I loosen the bundle of nerves in my throat with a sigh. “No matter what happens between us, now or in the future, together or apart… I pray with everything I have to all the gods that you survive the Sacrament.”

Arching my neck, I do the best I can to look up at him. At this angle, I can only see the deep indent of his dimple, the shadowed clench of his jaw.

“I would beg you not to participate if I had even a speck of hope that you’d listen to me. You won’t. But please—please don’t die.”

It’s arrogance that tenses his muscles against me. His voice is a growl, and he answers in the most dark male way, “I will not die.”

Flattening my hands on his pecs, I push against him. But of course he’s as solid as a damn statue and I only end up pushing myself across the sheets. He doesn’t budge an inch.

“Would you have told me then?” I ask.

---