Page 45 of Cursed Shadows 2

I could have lied, could have saidwecan’t lie, but then he might pick up on it, the shift in my heartbeat, a nervous tick on my expression—anything that gives me away as the liar I am. He studies me too closely, more closely than anyone in my life ever has.

And that’s not a secret I’m ready to share.

One day, maybe.

The warmth of his hand glides along my side until it settleson my tummy. I’m glad that I didn’t eat dinner, that my stomach isn’t bloated this night.

But not so glad that he found me in the woods.

He dips his head to graze his mouth over the shell of my ear. “It is not our night,” he concedes. “Yet I still came to steal you away.”

A cage of moths releases in my chest. Can’t fight the dreamy smile that paints itself over my lips. Does Daxeel see I am mere dough in his hands?

“You didn’t answer my stones.” Those little gravel things he steals from the edge of the village to throw at my window. “But I caught your scent,” he murmurs the words over the curve of my ear, like romantic declarations of love. “You are hunted too easily.”

“Maybe I like the way you hunt me.”

His teeth nip at my ear. Then, as quickly as he nipped, his muscles tense his chest against my back, and he stills.

He didn’t mean for that crack in his delicately crafted mask, the small and harmless bite of my flesh. And I suspect he chides himself for letting that side of him out with me. Even if it was only a little.

Daxeel takes so much care to keep me unafraid of him.

For the most part, I am.

But tonight, the unease is edged along the wings of those moths plaguing my insides.

After a pause, he repeats his earlier question, firmer, “Where are you sneaking off to, Nari?”

Hesitation steals me for a heartbeat. “I’m going into the human realm,” I confess, my voice a whisper.

I feel his frown against my temple.

Now, for another reason entirely, he’s stiff against me. His hand is firm on my belly, and I feel the scrape of his fingernails starting to dig into me.

Then he draws back, his hand slipping away from me with his retreat.

I turn to look up at him.

And it’s like he is just now seeing me. The clothes I wear,so different to the style and fashion of my land, but so very like the style and fashion on some of the humans in the Eternal Dance.

A plain black skirt cuts midway down my thighs. His gaze lingers over the hem for a beat before it drops to the flat white sneakers on my feet. His frown deepens on those, an obvious dislike, before he looks up at the white fitted sweater that’s shielding his view of the shape of my breasts. Then he makes an outright face at the fluffy white hat in my tight grip.

He snaps his gaze to mine, and it’s a loaded look he pins me with.

Instinct has my body clamping. I almost feel as though I’m a child caught by a parent.

Daxeel’s disapproval is as clear as those eyes that gleam through the night.

“I visit their realm sometimes,” I say with a nervous tug at the hat in my fisted hand. “Once every full moon or so.”

He tilts his head, the frown still etched in place, and he considers me like a foreign puzzle. ‘Why?’his look asks, but his words are different, “You are bargain born. Your mother returned to her lands, yes?”

I nod.

“It’s not to visit her,” he decides, and he’s done the math.

Mother left some seventeen years ago, when I was of two years and able to be weaned off her milk. Time moves so differently in the human realm, it’s faster and rushed, much like the humans themselves.

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