Page 169 of Cursed Shadows 4

My hands are whacked from my front with such force that they slam into the ground.

Daxeel is quick to straddle me. His eyes are wild and feral, the shadows writhing around him, distressed.

Daxeel looks down at me. His hand is gripped firm around my neck, enough pressure to silence me, to freeze my voice in time. But his face…

He blinks, and a gradual look of shock steals him.

Hesitation blanks his eyes, panic parts his lips.

Slowly, he looks up at the Mother Stone.

A puff of misty air gathers at his mouth. He exhales a curt sigh, then clenches his jaw.

I writhe beneath him, my middle stuck between his knelt legs, my neck pinned to the cold kiss of snow by his unyielding grip.

Daxeel drops his gaze to mine. “I offer the bond…” His voice is a rasping sound, worsened by the stream of blood falling down his face and leaking into his eye, “…of my evate.”

Grip tight on my windpipe, he slips his other hand to the seam of his boot. There, he fishes out the blade of a chalky dagger and fists it in his grip.

My cries are strangled, as wild as the thrashing of my legs kicking over the snowy floor, but as silenced as Mother’s nonresponses.

I spoke to her.

She did not answer. Did not speak to me.

Daxeel, it appears, she does speak to.

He lifts the dagger.

His jaw twitches, once, twice, then he steels himself. “In exchange for the Cursed Shadows to be restored to your children of the dark, to return the power—not to the Sgail line, but—to the iilra.”

Blood is pooling in my face. The throbbing pulses of my blood wave through my ears.

His fist firms on the hilt.

A silenced scream rips through me.

My legs kick the frosty air.

But that dagger…

It comes down on me all the same.

Daxeel plunges the blade into my chest.

I stiffen.

Toes curled in my boots, lips parted around a shuddering breath, eyes wide and filled with horror—

I wait for the eruption of pain to come before my inevitable death.

I could have asked Mother to spare me, to save my life. Instead, I chose to save the light. The light is more than I am, it is everything and all that exists beyond.

I never thought I would sacrifice myself for anything, anything at all. And now that my evate is knelt over me, his hand clutching the hilt of a dagger, that dagger pressing into my breastbone—I decide it is a good thing to die for.

The light.

And still… I do not die.

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