Page 30 of Cursed Shadows 3

Caught me eavesdropping, and he’s not pleased.

His jaw ticks—then he snatches me by the arm and hauls me to the staircase.

I suck in a sharp breath, my bare feet thudding on the carpet to match his rushed pace.

Daxeel’s grip doesn’t loosen, his mood doesn’t soften. He takes me all the way up to the seventh floor. Only then do his fingers loosen from around my forearm, before they slip away entirely.

He turns on me at the landing, then gestures with a slight lift of the chin. “This is the guest floor. Four bedchambers, three of them are taken. Each has their own modest washroom.”

The look he runs me over with is a blank one, one that carries no hint of how entangled we were just last Quiet, of his mouth hot on mine, his fingers inside of me. In that look, we might as well be mere strangers who pass on the street, never to meet.

I loathe the sickly ache it floods me with.

He turns his back on me and stalks down a narrow corridor that lines the descending staircase.

I follow.

“Your belongings are in the bedchamber assigned to you.” He pauses at a plain wooden door with an unpolished brass knob. “I won’t be around often.”

My heart tugs a little that I’m being banished to an upper floor, to my own bedchamber, and not to be welcomed permanently into his.

It irks me some that he wants his space from me, even if it’s to maintain some semblance of control over himself.

His hand lifts and, slowly, as though laced with warning, his fingers clutch my chin. He forces my head to tilt back and moves in closer. The tips of our noses graze.

For a long moment, he considers me.

Threads of shadows flick along his arm to wind around his hand, to reach me. They caress my chin where he holds it.

The contrast trembles my lip.

Then, “Do not leave Hemlock House under any circumstance—unless I expressly permit it.”

The command jolts through me.

And the second it does, his hand slips from my jaw.

Daxeel leaves without another word, not a backwards glance, not even a lingering touch.

I decide, as I watch him go, I hate him enough that I want to push him down the stairs.

6

††††††

In the three phases that I’ve been here, Daxeel has stayed true to his word. He isn’t around much at all.

I have seen him only twice. Once in passing at breakfast, the other at dinner. He didn’t so much as look my way either time.

Aleana has kept to her bed, as the healer ordered, and the halls of Hemlock House are thick with shadows, and still with silence.

It feels nothing like being in a home, but more in lodge in the dead of off-season. Much too quiet, and I’m much too alone.

This phase is no different.

Outside, the tree trunks no longer creak in the First Wind that has just passed, the leaves have stopped rustling, and no bootsteps clack and clock on the stone street through the little window wedged up the kitchen wall.

Loneliness comes stronger with the muted air.

---