Page 56 of Cursed Shadows 5

“What about that blond male, the one always watching us?” I fix my narrowed stare on Melantha. “Bracken.”

There.

A flicker of something.

A flutter of her lashes, so swift and small that if I wasn’t watching her so intently, I might have missed it; the clench of an angled jawline, an echo of the same dimples her son wears; and the faintest creak of leather as she fists her gloved hand by her side.

She says nothing.

So I press, “What’s to stop him from coming after me just to get to your family?”

Melantha slides her inky gaze to me. “For such a frightened thing, you made quite the reckless decision to live here, in a land of lawlessness.”

I jut my chin.

I don’t regret what I’ve done to be here. I don’t regret moving to Kithe and setting up shop with Eamon. I just wish, a little, that I had enough gold and silver to rent a guard of sorts for the rest of my life.

There will be times that no one is around to save me.

But I proved to myself on that mountain I’m more than capable of saving myself. I don’t need anyone—but it sure does help, and I’m not enough of a proud fool to turn my cheek to that. I am not fool enough to believe I will always be able to fight and chew and claw my way out of a corner.

The disappointment comes with a flurry of panic through me. A fear that is cold and lodges a chunk of ice in my throat.

“Bracken,” she echoes the name with an ancient nostalgia, one that glimmers her eyes with distant pain, but curls her upper lip and bares her sharp canines. “Our history has been done—and resolved. You are in no danger, save from his fantasies of destruction and revenge. Any shot he would aim at my house would have been taken in the Sacrament.” She spares me a side-glance. “He will not touch you.”

The ice-ball starts to melt.

It doesn’t dissipate entirely, not with the threat of sleeper assassins out in the streets of Kithe, watching me, hunting me.

“You said the litalf was nervous,” I start, a murmur, “and Eamon guessed it was because of Daxeel. But I do not have that protection anymore. It’s only a matter of time before others realise it.”

Melantha is quiet for a long moment, enough of a moment to turn down a lane, then cut left onto my street.

Then, she stops at the front of a plant shop and turns to face me. “You might be the only evate to have been saved from the bond. It is a wish I sought to fulfil for myself. I searched for answers in all the ways I could when Agnar found me. Males are born with love in their souls for their evates,” she says, a bitter twist to her mouth, “but the females feel no such connection. We are drawn to them in a way, but love?” She shakes her head slightly. “No, we seek our freedoms, we fight for release, and in doing so, we deteriorate any love we might ever have for the male, a self-fulfilling fate, perhaps. Or perhaps males are just beasts and we are justified in our hatred of them.”

A pause floods her in a deep inhale that rises her chest. She simmers in a shuddering lift of rage, one she tries to subdue.

I am still, I am silent.

“When Agnar saw me at Comlar that first time,” she says, her voice breathy, “when the bond awoke, my hand was in Bracken’s. My heartbelongedto Bracken. Then Agnar stole me. I was kept in a comfortable dungeon for the duration of the Sacrament. And when I was released, it was into the marriage and the hand of Agnar. Bracken’s male ego is predictable, like most males of our kind—and his revenge was found.”

‘His revenge was found…’

I swallow, thick.

“Bracken hunted me across Dorcha, chased my scent long after the Sacrament came to an end. Years had passed since I last saw him, but I sensed him immediately. His scent was mild, but it is one I knew better than my own.” A wistful smile tugs at her mouth. “I sensed him. I took some seconds to calm my nerves before I would turn to look him in the eye. A lost love. BeforeI could fill my lungs with breath, he stood behind me—and speared me with two daggers.”

I reel.

My boots scuffs back across the cobblestone, eyes wide.

That wistful smile she wore, it turns bitter. “One blade to my back and the other to the rear of my thigh. Bracken took away what I loved more than anything. More than I ever loved him. My thirst for battle. My love for the fight.” Her grin swells, wide and toothy and pained. “Bracken’s revenge on me was that I would never see battle again, that I would never know again what it is to stand as someone’s formidable opponent. He stole my agility, my strength, my balance and my speed. Now, I can only be the one who sneaks up behind a panicked litalf too distracted by his flurried determination. I am no formidable opponent, not anymore.” Her smile lessens into something mocking. “The blades were ateralum.”

Unhealable wounds, black metal soothed by nothing and no one. I have seen the scars some folk wear from this metal, and I know them to be more permanent than the flesh itself.

I have seen them on Daxeel’s back, whips fashioned from the black metal.

An awful ache blooms in my chest, and it is quick to reach my face and twist it with a grimace.

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