Page 141 of Cursed Shadows 4

Daxeel is as predictable as the path of the sun.

He needs to rebuild the wall between us, because that might make it easier for him to finish his mission.

But knowing all of that, reading him like a mere scroll, doesn’t ease the slight. Instead, his words are needles prickling into my flesh.

A hiss crawls up my throat. “That talent has kept me alive on this mountain.”

I wrench my arm out of his grip.

His fingers slip away but his fierce stare does not. “And I am sure your skills of seduction have been just as beneficial.”

My eyes flare. “I am here because I fought to be. I am alive because I fought for my life. You do not get to diminish that because you see nothing more than a brat when you look at me.” The hiss of my tone drops into something of a growl. “I have always been more than you see.”

“Your life is much to you.” His smirk is small, it is cruel for the sake of it, a punishment for all my wrongdoings, forhiswrongdoings, and I itch to claw it off his pretty face. “And yet it is nothing to anyone else.”

Something in me shatters.

Like those twigs Rune steps on, I snap—and I shove at Daxeel with a snarl twisting my lips.

My hands smack against his leather-wrapped bicep, and the grunt of the shove forces through me, but he doesn’t budge, doesn’t falter in his step, doesn’t lose an inch of balance.

He swerves his burning blue eyes my way.

I snarl up at him. “Your kind with their evates are as monstrous as my father always warned me. The beasts of the fae.”

The stillness from the males ahead brings silence, so I know they watch us, listen, but don’t intervene.

Daxeel just blinks at me before a frown knits his brow.

I push up on my toes and the words come sheathed in a hiss, “There is no need to beat the corpse, Daxeel. You have already killed me.”

He has done so much, too much.

It has left me in fragments. A death, in a way.

Still, he just looks at me.

Dark tendrils fall into his face, the oceans of his eyes burning like cobalt blazes, and those three little creases between his brows.

And he does nothing but look down at me.

Once, I might have felt like a mere rodent challenging a wolf. A human to a faerie hound. I might have cried. I might have played a game with him, lured him into me.

But in this moment, with snowfall misting around me and the ripple of Daxeel’s ocean eyes stirring aches in my chest, I take a purposeful step back, then let my gaze run him over with all the disdain I feel twisting my face.

I spit at his boots. “Vile beast.”

A shudder runs up his chest, and not the kind I once sought from him. It’s the kind that has his leathered hand fisting at his side, as though he fights the urge to lunge—and attack.

I keep my chin raised.

You left me in pieces.

You broke me, Daxeel.

You killed me.

Yet…

---