Page 1 of Love's Ace

Chapter 1

Wren

How much trouble wouldI get in if Iaccidentallyshot someone with a real arrow instead of an arrow of Fate?

Death was a kind of fate, wasn’t it?

It probably wouldn’t be worth it, even if the momentary flair of satisfactionwouldmake something inside me sing.

The men who stood in front of me were talking in hushed voices, and the soft shine ofwantradiating from the taller of the two stretched out in a red line, desperately reaching across the distance between them. It was a sparkling thing, a sweet pink thread that burned brighter and darker the closer he stood to his would-be soulmate.

It was so tenuous, so ready to be connected to the answering shimmer of red flickering in the smaller man’s chest. They were practically begging for my attention. This wasn’t one of those situations where their auras were wavering and might remain pink. For every person who sparked a crimson thread of Fate, there were hundreds who never found the person they were looking for.

Most people spent their entire life never finding their soulmate.

Soulmate.

Fuck, I hated that word.

I understood lust on a base level. It wasn’t often that I wanted to indulge in it, but when I did, it was palpable and sweet; a ripe fruit ready to burst saccharine on my tongue, even if it made my stomach turn when I swallowed it down. While it was there, it was all fire and a burning ache that demanded release. It was the emotion that cameafterlust that I didn’t understand—the red swirl of aching, stretching auras. The desperation. The need.

Cupids couldn’t feelit.

Love.

Fuck love. Fuck emotions. And fuck the fact that I couldn’t kill the two people standing in front of me and walk away before I had to see the same thing I’d watched so many times before.

My fingers snapped, and the arrow that appeared in my hand was bright red. When I pulled my bow from my back and drew the string, the damn thing practically flew without me even trying. It was the eager essence of a cupid’s aura. Itwantedto lodge itself home in the smaller man’s chest after passing straight through his taller companion and catching that line of red.

The pink faded. Vanished. And in its place was aconnection. The arrow dissolved, becoming a part of their bond and sealing their fate.

Soulmates.

I turned as they stepped toward each other, before I had to watch the wonder in their eyes as they kissed like it was their first time. Ihatedthis moment, impossible and intangible to me. My insides were frozen to the very emotion I’d been created to spread—cupids weren’t allowed to feel the gifts they were born to give.

I would never know what love tasted like—the only flavor in my mouth was bitter ash as I fled the scene. I didn’t need to see them kiss to know they’d go home together, that their desperate clinging would change to something softer as that red line burned brighter with every touch.

Their world would spiral and tilt on its axis, and they would stay together unless something dug into their very souls and broke the line between them.

As long as I was around, I wouldn’t let that happen… but I couldn’t always be there, blinded by the crimson burn of their affection.

Gods, I really,reallyhated love.

It was ironic, since my aura—my capacity tofeellove—was the very thing that had drawn my maker to me. It was so strong I could create a cupid’s arrow, so strong I would have found a love that could have stretched beyond one life and into the next. I would have painted the world crimson and found my soulmate…

I would have been happy.

Instead, I’d been plucked from my mother’s arms before I’d even taken a breath, before I’d had the chance to experience that first, innocent love of a mother and their child.

I had no idea what jackass thought it was a good idea to snatch babies from their parents, but whoever they were, their methods had existed since the first breath of human life.

Still, it was probably the damn practice that gave humans the idea that cupids were fat, cherub-like children. We’d started out that way, but we weren’t allowed to operate in the field until we’d trained for twenty years. A cupid only stopped aging when their first arrow hit its target. After that, we were immortal… unless we were killed by our only enemy.

The Enmity.

I wondered sometimes if they were picked from birth as well—they were our opposites, after all, our adversaries in a war olderthan time itself—but they seemed to grow their ranks more with adults, with humans who experienced the world around them and learned to hate, learned to open themselves up to something darker.

Something I was trained to kill.

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