Page 41 of Shadebound
“Donotspeak about my sister.” I warned.
His large body quivered with the telltale signs of his urge to shift, and as he was close enough, I could smell the smokinessof the fire pulsing along his skin. He leant down, oblivious to my inner meltdown.
“You think you’re untouchable. That your magic and your surname make you special.” He stepped closer. “But I disagree. I think it makes you deadly. I think it makes you dangerous, just like my father said.”
Despite the tremors in my hands, I laughed darkly. “You got one thing right,Fiore.”
My fingers curled slowly around the razor blade I’d been reaching for. The one that was just a handle with a deadly sharp blade on the edge.
“Stay out of my way,” he hissed. “I won’t ask nicely again.”
He shoved me back and stepped away. Clearly thinking he had the upper hand in the conversation, or that even without magic I was useless at defending myself.
Or that I wasn’t fuelled by petty vengeance, spite, and a deep hatred of men who pushed around women.
I yanked the blade free and slashed it across his cheek, just beneath the eye—not close enough to blind him, but close enough to hurt. I’d missed his eye on purpose. A calculated strike, meant to sting more than just skin. But the threat was there all the same as blood sprayed with a wet hiss, speckling my lips.
I licked them clean, savouring the sharp, coppery taste of his pain as he stumbled back, hissing through his teeth.
Then I grinned, but it was not friendly. “From now on, I’m going out of my way to ruin your life. Consider me your personal fucking plague.”
Then I barged right past him and stormed out of the bathroom, forgetting entirely whatever it was I wanted to ask Maya and Zayden or that they were now back in the room waiting for me. Purely because I had breakfast to get to, a schoolto get to know. And a shifter cunt’s slow and torturous death to plot.
At least, I did until I saw a fresh set of headless roses on my bed. Thorns glistening with dewdrops, my missing necklace gently wrapped around them like a ribbon.
And a folded-up note in a rather confused Zayden’s hand.
Part Three
‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’
William Shakespeare
Field Journal — Entry #019 - Classified
Not everyone hears the call. You have to be dying—really dying—and still want more. That’s when Death speaks. Not in words, exactly. It’s a pull. Cold, certain. Like being offered a hand when you’re already falling.
You think it’s a second chance. A way out. A way back. But it’s not.
It’s just another way down. A second death that takes longer.
We don’t come back healed. We come back haunted.
Chapter Thirteen, Sweet Stalker
The stone spiral staircase moaned beneath our boots, each step a reluctant descent into a day of lessons and forced socialising. Sprinkled with a bit of beige slop and awkwardness about the gift in my room.
Zayden kept talking, but I barely registered his voice. He wasn’t saying anything important enough to get through my anger. Not about the strange, unfinished moment with Maya upstairs. Not about whatever tension that still clung to the corners of his mouth. The only thing of note he’d asked had been about the flowers that a random girl had been paid to drop off.
“Did you order flowers or something?” he’d asked me, as the necklace now safely around my throat turned yellow.
The shade my sister claimed it turned when my hair was almost growing with how full of secrets my head was.
I’d blinked, pretending I wasn’t eager to read the note tucked into my combats. “No.”
A beat had passed. I hadn’t looked at him or Maya, but I had felt him slowing beside me.
“You’re not worried about someone sending them to you?” he’d asked, softer that time.
