Page 153 of Cursed Shadows 4

No matter what that costs.

Daxeel runs his hand through his thick, tousled hair. There is a distant regret in his eyes. “I should have offered you more security. I was so careful not to scare you that I avoided telling you what you needed to know. The night your father found us, I was going to confess to you about us—the evate. I meant to propose to you. The treasures were your gifts.” He drops his hand to his side and turns his sorrowed gaze to me. “I intended to give you what you wanted. Animals and gardens and a rich library; love and family and friends. Everything and anything you desired. I even offered Eamon a place with us in Kithe… for you.”

“But Daxeel.” I shake my head, slightly. “I did not know any of that.”

His mouth thins for a beat before he nods. “I decided when you needed to know what I knew. I decidedwhatyou needed to know. I was wrong for that. Perhaps… I played a bigger part in our demise than I ever cared to acknowledge.”

The closest to an apology one can get from a dark male.

And it is not enough.

I limp a step back. The pain is muted by the powder, knitting through my flesh and muscle, but it does smart.

The hiss of pain sheathes my tired, weary voice, “This doesn’t change my decision, Daxeel. You will let me go if I survive this… You will release me.”

He turns his ocean eyes to me. Unlike any other time I have looked into them, there is a true ocean mist—a dusting of tears gathered.

The sight thickens my throat instantly.

It’s the bond, it’s just the bond, that’s all it is.

I step back, another hobbled limp. “Our story ends with the Sacrament.”

His jaw clenches.

Another limp. “And our love was buried so long ago. It’s time I released my grief. It’s time I moved on with my life.”

His hands flex at his sides.

I turn my back on him and head towards the crackle of the campfire.

His words follow me before he does, “We will camp under the shade for the daylight. Then we climb.”

A moment, a spark from a flint. We return to our existence as enemies on this mountain.

I don’t so much as look back at him.

I leave him behind, as I should have done so long ago.

32

††††††

The quiet of the climb unnerves me.

The summit is so close now, the Mother Stone just over the rocky overhang that looms above us, as slanted and treacherous as a cliff. The sight of it gives me the bitter, amused thought of a gravestone emerging in the distance, peeking through the thin wisps of cloud and mist.

And we, the arrogant fools that all fae are, climb closer.

Any mind that is sane should look upon the peak of the Mother Stone—the charred onyx and marble oval, the blend of light and dark with a bolt of grey running down its centre—and run in the other direction.

But we lift our gazes to it, and we place our hands on the jagged surface of the cliff, and we climb.

Towards it.

Closer.

And so there must not be a sane mind among us.

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