Page 152 of Cursed Shadows 4

Cheek facing me, he asks, blunt, “What happened when your father took you from me that night?”

“The night under the willow?” I ask.

In answer, he nods and turns his darkening expression to face me.

I heave a sigh. “I was punished.”

There’s a touch of concern in the frown that pinches his brows. He is quiet for a beat before, “How?”

“You think I merely received a lecture,” I say with a lousy smile, so tired of it all, “that I am a darling and spoiled, that I faced a mere speech.” I throw my hands up. “So what does it matter? I know how you see me.”

A desperate glint sharpens his gaze and he hisses his words with a fresh urgency, “What happened, Nari?”

“Father beat me.”

My blunt answer strikes him, like a blow to the face.

He flinches, his lashes fluttering, and falls his weight back onto one boot.

Cerulean eyes drop—and sear into my chest, as though looking right through my ribcage to my heart space. He reads me, searches for any hint of a lie, for a falter in my heartbeat, a flurry in its pace.

He won’t find it.

“Father smacked me so many times I lost count,” I tell him. “He never hit me before that night. But that night he did. He dragged me by the hair, he threw me into the metal tub, hit me some more, then had the servants scrub me until I bledand screamed, and he destroyed all the treasures you gave me, and…” I swallow down a sudden thickness in my throat. “And he meant to send me to the Grott.”

Daxeel looks somewhere between feral and ill.

A sickly pallor has washed out his honeyed complexion, and he cannot find it in himself to meet my unfaltering gaze. He looks over my shoulder, at the lilac curtain of leaves we disturbed, not at me.

His voice darkens into the pits of the gods, a wrath that ices my spine. “He would send you to the Grott?”

“If I could convince him, you, and the High Court that my rejection of you was sincere—then I would be spared the Grott.”

His lashes lower over ocean eyes. His cheek faces me, the tension in it, muscles bolted to bones.

“I lied to you at the High Court,” I say. “I lied when I said that I ignored your stones on my window. I did not ignore them—because I was not in my room.” If now is not the time to give the full truth to one another, then it will be never, because soon there will be no time at all. “I did not know you came,” I confess to him—and probably to all of Comlar. “I was in the basement, with boneworms that Father had the servants force into me.”

“How long?”

“All two days and two nights before the court. I was only released and purged from the boneworms the night of.”

He drops his head.

And he stays that way for a long moment.

Distantly, I hear the roaring crackle of a fire.

Dare will have it searing hot and ready to cook whatever fish Samick was able to catch. And with his icy—and peculiar—methods, we should have enough.

That is what I would rather be doing now.

Eating, filling my stomach, fuelling myself for the summit, then perhaps resting off some of the black powder before we keep going.

I know I will need all the strength I can get.

Because I will be fighting against Daxeel.

And I will be fighting to survive.

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