Page 135 of Cursed Shadows 4

The sight of him knocks the air right out of me.

You saved me.

Daxeel sits on a log beyond the flames licking the air between us. With his head bowed, dark tendrils fall into his face, and his forearms are braced on his leathered thighs.

I watch him.

For a while, with each moment that the black powder allows me a scrap of awareness, I watch Daxeel—as though I expect that, with a mere blink, he will disappear and it will all have been an illusion.

But he doesn’t disappear.

There he is, hunched on the log. The steady breaths that gently swell his chest against his leathers, each muscle carved from stone itself, his pink mouth only slightly parted.

He doesn’t see that I am awake. His eyes are closed, his long lashes casting spidery shadows down the honeyed hue of his handsome face.

So beautiful.

So peaceful.

I ache to reach out and touch him, even if I burn my flesh on the flames between us.

But isn’t that what I have done?

Isn’t that what I have been doing all this time?

Reaching out, burning myself, then reaching out again and again, trapped in this eternal loop of pain.

I drop my gaze to his boots.

He saved my life in my plummet to death. But he only did that to save me for the end—for his mission.

To kill me.

‘What if I were to push you?’

I stand on the edge of the tower. ‘Then I would die.’

His arms come around my middle. ‘It is not your time.’

My lashes shut on the mist of my eyes.

He told me then. All that time ago on the tower at Comlar, he warned me of what was to come.

The clues in all his words, how I thought he was toying with me, and he was, but in a way I never imagined.

Foolish halfling.

Too romantic for her own good.

‘Apologies for not thinking in poetry as you so clearly do.’

One of the first things he ever said to me.

So much I have learned these months in the Midlands. And yet, to pay close attention is something my selfishness never allowed.

I didn’t learn enough.

My brow knits at the thought. A pain burrows deep in my chest. I swipe it aside before it can stir Daxeel awake in our shared echo.

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