Page 4 of Cursed Shadows 3

Selfish, some call me. Self-absorbed, even.

Maybe it’s the truth. Because I only think of myself in the face of the Cursed Shadows—in the threats beneath the whispers of his words.

It’s self-pity that sorrows me.

“All this time,” I say softly, “you were wearing a mask, even in the Eclipse.” Unshed tears thicken the defeat of my voice. The courtyard seems glazed now. “I’ve never known you. Not truly.”

In a breath, I’m tugged back from the tower’s edge. The arm around my middle yanks just once, but firm enough that I stagger.

Daxeel spins me around to stumble into his chest.

Before I can right myself, stuck in this haze of delay and disorientation, his hands snatch up my cheeks, and he brings his lips to mine.

Even through the cloudiness of gathered tears in my sight, the cobalt gleam of his eyes captures me whole. I stare into them, eyes meant to destroy me—and feel the lazy grin he presses to my lips.

A tear escapes my eye. Just one. It rolls down my cheek.

“If I can’t fall out of love with you,” he says and drags his smile to the corner of my mouth, “then I will ruin the love you have for me.”

There, at the edge of my lips, where that single tear streaks a path, he plants a chaste kiss.

He kisses it away.

“Your tear taste of your defeat,” he whispers, and it spurs on more to fall down my cheeks, “and of my victory.”

Turning my chin, I tug out of his hold.

He lets me go, hands dropping to his sides. His eyes gleam brighter in the darkness, wisps of shadows licking up his inked neck.

He watches me stagger back a step, two steps, and is silent as I run my hands down my face.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” My voice hitches into a whine against my palms, not a whine of tears, but as he said,mydefeat. “You’re breaking me, Daxeel.”

And he is.

I came here to Comlar with ugly, naïve hope. Too hopeful, too cocky.

His sheer ruthlessness isn’t what I knew of him, isn’t what I expected.

Now, I am well acquainted with that darkness that lives within him.

For the first time since he stepped foot on the tower, strength hardens his tone, it snuffs out the tease of his victory and solidifies into barbed stone, “Then you are too weak.”

I scoff. The gesture jolts my shoulders.

Dropping my hands from my face, I throw a withering look at him, not one of fury or hurt, but of sheer exhaustion.

It startles him, enough to shutter his face. The crack in his mask is gone in a blink.

‘Too weak.’

What a laugh that should give me.

But there is no humour in me when I say, “You knew that when you loved me. You went to such great lengths never to scare me, and now?NowI’m too weak?”

He levels his stare with mine. “I do that still. If I revealed my true self to you, the rage within me, you wouldn’t just crack or break. Your heart would stop, and you would crumble at my feet.”

I run him over with a detached look. “I don’t know who you are. I miss my dark one.”

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