Page 47 of Cursed Shadows 3

Latching onto Dare’s announcement of her sickliness, of her death to come, Aleana flickers her stare to her silently smouldering brother across the table.

“Please, brother,” she says, and the sound of her voice is so delicate, like polished glass that wears too many cracks, so close to shattering.

I almost smile something proud at her manipulations.

Looking at the corner of the room, I see out the corner of my eye that Daxeel’s tattooed hand—fingers streaked with fine lines that gleam as darkly as fresh ink—tightens around the handle of his knife. Part of him must want to spear that knife through Dare’s throat, maybe Eamon’s… maybe mine.

I try to find his emotions stirring in me, somewhere, but I come up short. All I feel is my own twist of anticipation, something ugly like razor-winged moths fluttering in my chest.

He’s either realised that I feel him sometimes and is practicing shutting me out or I haven’t gotten the hang of this part of the bond yet.

He smacks the knife down on the table. The wood shudders beneath the plates and mugs and chalices.

Only Aleana and I flinch, but the males don’t so much as flutter a lash.

Shadows flick over his fisted hand, lash over his shoulders as though prepared to lunge at us.

“Fine,” he grits out, and the barbed word comes from his curled lips with such reluctance that I’m swept back to our time shared in the human lands together—when he marinated in a foul mood the entire trip.

I stay quiet.

He hasn’t said anything about me going. Only Aleana.

As the holder of my slave contract, he has the authority to decide where I go and with who. Everyone else knows it too, since we all sit in a thick quiet, waiting for him to answer this unspoken question.

The burn of his eyes makes me think of the sensation of ice pressed against the skin too long. It’s a scald that, if I were to scratch, would scrape searing pain down my cheek.

I don’t meet his gaze.

I know he considers me, considers letting me go with Aleana—and then I feel it. The storm of annoyance lifting through me, not so much an echo this time, more of a ghost that comes and goes.

A grin threatens to break my schooled expression.

Females, that feeling would have said to me if it could. The females in his life, agitating him to the bones. Yet he seems to make such effort for us in these small favours, because he finally answers that silent question—

“We will need Nari for glamour.”

The breath I suck in through my nostrils is a sharp one. I contain it as best as I can, though it aches to rush back out of me in an excited squeal.

Aleana makes no such restraints. Her hand snatches out for mine until my fingers are smooshed in her death-grip. “Let’s get ready!”

I spare no one a glance before I rush out of the dining hall with her, scared that if I’m a beat too slow in leaving, he will change his mind.

So I steer Aleana to my bedchamber, where I have some human fashions stowed away in my trunks.

As for the males, they will need to borrow some things of Eamon’s, if he has enough to go around.

My glamours only do so much.

‘We will need Nari for glamour.’

It’s a truth, sure.

An honest enough decision that if Daxeel were light fae, then he would have been able to speak it easily.

But it’s a half-truth, too.

A veil draped over the reality that he allows this trip, maybe for my contentment, maybe so I can be free with his sister for a short while, or even that he won’t let me out of his sight for too long.

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