Page 127 of Cursed Shadows 5

Shrapnel flies at my face. It hits my forehead with a sharp bite, one that earns a wince through my bared teeth.

I drop the blooded rags to the floor. The crumpled pile lands beside the fallen shrapnel.

Only. it isn’t cardboard, not a torn piece from the box that flew out and whacked me on the forehead.

I am staring down at an envelope smeared with the same shade of brown that stains my cotton set.

An envelope…

Memories chug through the mist of my mind.

Daxeel gave me that at the Sabbat. I tucked it into my holster and—then everything happened and I forgot all about it.

It was lost to my mind mist.

I stayed at Eamon’s side until he was hauled off by his mother and father, and Melantha had her arms hooked under my pits, dragging me away as I thrashed and shrieked.

The envelope stayed flat between my holster and my thigh that whole time, even as Melantha took me back to my dwelling and I collapsed to the floor, wailing.

The envelope stayed in place as I was silent on the floor, eyes on an ox bone.

It didn’t move as Hedda sniffed and licked the blood from my face, my neck, my arms.

But, hours later, maybe a phase later, when I woke to a knock of the door, and I staggered to my feet, and I ignored the knock, and I dragged myself to the bedchamber, where I peeled off my cotton set, stripped nude, tore off the thigh holster, then climbed into bed—

The envelope fell with the clothes.

It was buried, lumped under them.

And, phases later, when I kicked the bloody, cotton lump under the bed, booted it out of my sight, the envelope skidded with it, hidden. And when I packed, and I just reached my arm under the bed, and scooped everything I touched into a box, without so much as a glance in my uncaring rush, that envelope was swept into the box.

Now, two months and two weeks since that envelope was given to me by Daxeel, it is here in my trembling hand.

I struggle to focus through the fog that is eternal in my head, a mist that clouds my thought, slows me down.

I think back to the parade, Eamon standing with Rune, and Daxeel giving me this envelope.

‘…burn it. Bury it. But please, take it.’

‘It is a message to our bond.’

That is what he said to me.

Words I forgot until this moment, with old secrets inked onto parchment, and now in my grip.

I loosen a shuddering breath.

The truth is, the letter inside is a lie.

Daxeel meant what he wrote and gave to me that night.

But that was before I plunged a knife into his throat, before I tried to kill him and offer him up to Mother in exchange for Eamon.

It’s something I try not to think about.

I should do that now, ignore the letter, throw it into the flames downstairs in the lit fireplace, or bury it away for another time.

Yet, my thumb glides to the wax seal. It hooks under the fold—then tears it open.

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