Page 142 of Cursed Shadows 4

Those fragments of myself… they are different to what the whole person once was. I sense it in myself, a shift as I have started to pick up those shattered pieces and at least attempt to glue them back together again. But they have come together different, maybe wrong, but different all the same.

Ifeeldifferent.

I am.

I’m not so sure that’s so terrible.

“You know nothing about the true horror of evate,” Daxeel growls. “I watched my father torment his evate, my mother.” He takes a step closer to me, the disgust of me curling his upper lip. “The slightest wrong look at another male that father misread meant phases in the dungeons. I wear the same scars that my mother does, from the same male who inflicted them. I never wanted that for myself—or for you.” The frown deepens on his honeyed complexion. “I always wanted our love to be mutual. Isn’t there less pain in that existence?”

His hand shoots out and snatches me by the chin.

A grunt catches in my throat.

Bringing his face to mine, his softly spoken tone is not sweet, but a warning, “I chose to be the suitor you wanted. But that has fooled you to underestimate my true nature. I am what I am, and I am capable of the worst tortures imaginable. I fight for my choice not to harm you. Even when you push me to the edge,” he snarls against my mouth, “every waking moment, you exist to make me suffer.”

My whisper is anything but subdued, I speak it like a threat, right back at him, “And you, I.”

I don’t waver in our locked stares, the challenge that sears his eyes into my soul. I don’t baulk.

For a long moment, we stare each other down like predators locked in open territory, waiting for the other to move, to flee, to fight.

That’s what I see in the ripples of his eyes. He expects me to back down.

They all do, I’m sure, the males watching us like we are their little source of entertainment on this mountainside, as I suspect the audience at Comlar does.

Let me entertain you, then.

Let me dance. Let me paint.

Let me perform.

My upper lip curls around the dagger I prepare for him. “I do not love you anymore.”

Lashes flutter over cobalt eyes.

“And if what you say is true, that you were not yourself when you courted me,” I say, smiling wretchedly around my words, “then I never did love you.”

Muscle by muscle, his face turns to stone. Dimples carve deep into his cheeks with shadows like inked paintbrushes swiped at him.

He drops his hand from my chin and draws back a step. I hear the shudder of his breath. His shadows skitter around his shoulders—disturbed from their slumber deep in his leathers.

And the still silence up the slope has thickened into a tension that I feel as freshly as the cold.

Still, I want to hurt him.

I want Daxeel to suffer the heartache I do.

If he’s to blame me for it, kill me for it, then let me fulfil it to my greatest potential.

“Daxeel… To me, you mean nothing. Nothing more than a persistent headache.”

Those fragments just don’t fit right anymore. I’ve rebuilt something of an echo, a shadow of myself, and I do not regret it.

A growl shudders his chest. “Come, or I will break your ankle and drag you to the summit.”

His threat runs cold and true.

My shoulders tense.

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