Page 20 of Promise of Darkness
Each stone lights up.
“Ready?” Thiago asks.
A flash of silver glints in the night to my right.
I react purely on instinct, shoving the prince aside as the knife bound for his back drives directly toward me. I snap my palm into the chin of the assailant, feeling something bump my arm. A face glares at me from inside the cowl of its hood, and I grab the assassin’s hand, twisting it to try and force him to drop the knife—
And then my blood turns to acid.
A scream tears loose.
The assassin punches me in the cheek, then vanishes in a whirl of smoke, but I’m barely aware of it.
I stagger back, slapping a hand to my arm. Blood wells between my fingers, a slash I barely felt until it was too late. My vision blanches as the pain nearly drives me to the ground.
“After him!” Thiago bellows, catching me as my knees give out.
The prince’s retinue fan out, hunting the assailant, but he’s gone, vanishing into the trees that surround the Hallow.
I can barely breathe. Barely see.
The whole world is spinning, and it isn’t because of the portal. The magic within it is powering down, losing focus as the prince’s half-formed spell begins to dissolve.
Thiago picks up the knife, his face savage. “Do you trust me?”
Somehow, I laugh through chattering teeth. “Not even an inch.”
“Then trust this: if anything happens to you while you belong to me, your mother has cause to demand my head. Hold out your arm.”
I have no choice.
He takes my wrist, and I nearly scream again as the simple touch ignites new agony. Black veins crawl up the skin of my forearm, twisting like poisonous brambles hunting for my heart.
Every fae alive knows what that means.
A Deathbound Blade.
“Unfortunately… for you,” I pant, “I think you’re… going to lose your… head after all.”
All these years, scrambling to stay alive in my mother’s court, and it comes to this. A tiny little scratch. An act of mercy, my instincts urging me to react before I’d even had a chance to realize what was happening to me.
My old swordmaster would be impressed with my reaction time.
Unluckily for me, I’m going to end up just as dead as if I hadn’t seen the knife coming. There’s no means to cure the curse attached to a Deathbound Blade. More dangerous than any poison, the curse will eat my heart alive from the inside out.
And I’ll feel every excruciating moment of it.
Someone wanted the prince to suffer.
“How little faith you have in me,” the prince murmurs. “Hold still, Princess. This will hurt.”
Heat flares from his palm.
The pain wells. I scream again, throwing back my head. It incinerates me from within, my blood boiling as if it’s pure acid. Some fae know how to heal, but this isn’t healing. He’s using his magic to destroy the curse that creeps through my body.
Then it’s over.
I come to in the prince’s arms, my head slumped against his chest. A warm palm splays across my back, rubbing soothing circles.
