Page 132 of Cursed Shadows 4

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DAXEEL

††††††

Time freezes.

The cold has frosted over the world,hisworld, and Daxeel can do nothing, absolutely nothing… but watch.

The litalf slams his hand down on the ledge—but not on the ledge. His hand smacks down on Nari’s throat, and his weight is too much for her, her limp body.

The litalf’s mistake costs them both.

His weight pulls down on her neck… then drags her body to the blood-soaked ledge. She slips, and the litalf with her.

They fall.

For a beat, a heartbeat that costs too much, Daxeel is stone. He is frozen, frosted, and he simply stares.

Face slack, he watches as her limp body slips over the side of the ice-ledge… then falls into the cold air.

The litalf’s hand leaves her throat, but his panic, his realisation of his own mistake, it’s too late. He’s falling already.

They both do.

And for that one, pulsating heartbeat that thumps throughout Daxeel’s body, of hot rushes and icy fear clashing in his veins, he can’t move.

Thunder splits the air. A thunder louder than the quakes rattling the earth.

Caius shouts it, a roar, a blast—a farewell.

“For Dorcha!”

The moment the declaration leaves him, Caius leaps from the ledge—and he jumps for the litalf who dares fall into his path.

Mid-air, Caius barrels into the light male.

And in a blink, Daxeel sees the flash of metals as their brutal fight begins in their plummet.

But in that same blink, Daxeel is torn out of his frozen state, thawed so quickly it’s as though lightning struck him where he stands, and he swerves his gaze back to Nari, just a reach beneath the two fighting fae.

Nari falls.

On her back, the wind rushes up at her, arms seemingly floating as though she’s already dead. But the flittering of her serenity, her calm, it strings through the threads of their bond, and so he knows she is still alive, but without the fight to stay that way.

The lashing of a whip cuts through his vision.

Daxeel flings his gaze to Dare.

He runs the cusp of the crevasse-split ground, dodging drops and holes and slippery spots of ice as he throws out his whip with precise cracks—and aims each strike at Nari.

But the lashes don’t reach her.

He can’t lasso her, can’t stop her plummet. It’s a desperate act, to secure her with the whip and yank her into himself. But Dare has no other means of stopping her plummet.

Daxeel does…

The strike of realisation is violent, and it shoves Daxeel from his stance into a barrelling sprint. His shoulders boulder into any fae in his path, light or dark, they are sent flying out of his way.

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