Page 20 of Cursed Shadows 2

Mutely, I blink at him. His seed paints my lips, glitters on my cheeks, it coats my throat, and all I can taste is his salt.

But that is a question I didn’t expect.

It’s one I sure as hell don’t want to answer.

I could lie. But something tells me Daxeel will be the one to figure out that little talent of mine as quickly as I loved him.

So I don’t.

Instead, I smile and feel his gaze land on his seed glistening on my skin. “Did you not like it?” Leaning closer to him, I flatten my hands on the floor between our knees, and I move in like I’m about to crawl. “I liked it.”

Danger flashes in his eyes. It twitches at his upper lip, and I watch his inner battle rage on within him. Through those harsh breaths that wrack him still, like he’s run across the lands and now stops for a much-needed rest, he just stares at me, long and hard.

Then I win, because he loses the fight to interrogate me any further and just says, “Get on the fucking bed, Nari.”

6

the night I stayed in his trap

††† TEN YEARS EARLIER †††

Behind the midnight-blue curtain of the willow, I’m sprawled out on my back, fresh juices from a plum staining my lips. My full basket of treasures and trinkets is perched on the grass above my head, within arm’s reach, and that keeps me content.

Kneeling between my legs, Daxeel leans over me and licks the juices from my mouth with small flicks of his tongue and tender kisses.

My lashes flutter, not just the plum’s effects, but I am utterly serene this night. “Why do your females come to this land,” I mutter, but with his ministrations, I find it more of a challenge with each passing moment to keep to our chat, “but so few of mine go to yours?”

Between the gentle sucks of plum on my lips and the licks of the juiced trails down my chin, he murmurs his words to me, keeping his mind where mine is starting to slip to lust, “It can be hard for a light female to live in my world. How different it will be for her. Suppose that prevents too many romances from forming between your kind and mine.”

It takes my mind a few sluggish seconds before it clicks. He means the difference in how females are regarded between our worlds.

The iilra should be the rulers of their lands, as our Sisters are our princesses. But their rulers, their royals, are the descendants of the best warriors, not the females most connected to the gods, to the world, to the lands, and in their case, to the darkness. Our royal bloodline is the appropriate one, where the females are divinely connected to all.

In his world, it sounds cold and harsh. There, females are tobe kept, not unkindly, but kept all the same. They are beneath the males in those lands. It’s another reason I don’t fully embrace fantasies of running away with him into the cold, harsh darkness.

I murmur a question against his full lips, “Do you believe that?”

A gentle kiss grazed along the corner of my mouth before he answers, “Believe what?”

“That your males are superior?”

A flick of the tongue over my lips, then, “Yes.”

The honesty of his simple answer silences me for a moment.

The tip of his nose grazes mine. “But I do not look down on females, I do not harm them, I do not disrespect them. Females merely have different gifts and require protection.”

My frown is aimed up at the midnight leaves. “Females rule nature, males do not. How are you superior when you are in fact inferior?”

“Am I?” he whispers against my skin, like he’s whispering the sweetest words of all. “We both have nature respond to us.”

“I see animals and they come to me. They run from you. I touch a flower bud and it blooms. You touch it, it wilts. Nature responds to me, a female, because nature is herself a goddess.”

“Your gifts are pretty petals—ours are blood and death.” His tender kisses come with a dark smile as he draws back to kneel between my legs. “You think you are superior to me?” Stealing my ankles in his firm hands, he brings them up to rest on his chest. “That you, a female, should stand above me?” His dark smile turns to the arch of my foot. There, he grazes a kiss so tender and intimate that it wets my core instantly. “Am I not stronger, faster, larger, better?” He looks down at me, shadows of the night slithering down his face, darkening the look he gives me. “Is it not you who needs me, my protection?”

I narrow my eyes at him.

His voice is a husky murmur against the bone of my inner ankle, “I see animals and they run from me, because they fear me. A flower I touch will die in my hand if I choose it to,because it fears me.”

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