Page 15 of Cursed Shadows 4

Will I accept alliance with the dark ones? Fight alongside them? Will I be their willing lamb to the slaughter?

Or will I be yet another enemy to hunt down?

I steel myself against the wretched feeling of being watched in such a private moment, and drop my gaze to the ink glistening on Daxeel’s lifted hand.

I curl my upper lip. “Don’t you fucking touch me,” I spit, and look up from beneath my lashes at him. “Beast.”

His face shutters. The shadowy hue of his eyes, oceans in the depths of night, flicker.

I recognise the hurt, I feel it in the echo strung between us. But it does nothing to encourage me closer to him.

Here, in the courtyard, with light on one side, dark on the other, I see him for what he is. An enemy.

And I know him for what he is.

Myenemy.

The lovely pinkish hue of his lips captures my attention whole. They part, as if to speak, as if to whisper a sweet promise. But he finds no words to give.

For a heartbeat—one so consuming that I feel it pulse through the icy nerves of my body—we just look at each other.

The natural kohl shadows should darken his eyes, but they only brighten their brilliant blues. As strong as ever, the urge to fall into them, to be lost in the worlds they contain, tugs at my heart as though they are mere fiddle strings.

The shift pains me.

Daxeel is not asking me to join him anymore.

This is our farewell.

Silent looks fuelled by nothing more than anguish and poisoned love and perhaps even a touch of regret.

But it is too late for regret.

No matter how strong his urge is to take my hand and drag me with him to the side of the dark ones, we both know he cannot. I am an enlisted contender of Licht, even if I am only an unwilling second.

So without a word spared on my deceiver, my heartbreaker, my monster, I turn my back on him—and I stalk off.

He lets me go.

I stand alone.

The scent of fresh leather is all around me, sharpened by the cutting silver of polished blades and the stink of armour that is too close to freshly painted walls.

The harsh whispers of the already allied litalves, the occasional clang of metal as armours collide in this packed crowd, it bombards me.

Encircled by my folk, I have never felt more isolated.

My back presses against the harsh stone of the crumbled wall, and still, there are so many of us packed in to this narrow edge along the portal that I can hardly draw in a breath that isn’t slick with the scent of others.

My shoulder is knocked once, twice as a stream of litalves squeeze by me; two warriors simply turn around to scan the faces on the grandstand, but trample all over the toes of my boots—

The hiss that comes on instinct, the one I aim at the pair of warriors who don’t even bother to lower a glance at me, is silenced by the whispered atmosphere of the courtyard.

I must be invisible for all the recognition spared on me.

The hiss dies in my throat.

Pressing my back to the wall, I inch along it until my boots knock against the fallen stone, a sprinkle of debris and rubble. In this crammed jar of muscle and leathers, I twist around and hoist myself up the pile of rubble. The wall is mostly ruins here,slanted stacks of broken rocks, and so I can’t climb up to the furthest heights of the wall. I manage to perch myself on a sturdy edge, far up enough to get that feeling of a fresh breath, the same I get when I tug a blanket off my face in the early Quiet after too long of near-suffocation.

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