Page 45 of Mark of Love (Love Mark 3)

Next to me, a riot of emotions zinged through my true love: remorse, fear, anger, sorrow, hope, fear again.

The woman had no idea how to deal with her feelings. Violence must be her default response to push down anything resembling emotion that tried to rise to the surface.

I looked up, wondering what kind of life she must’ve had. Her childhood couldn’t have been easy. Hell, I can’t imagine any part of her life had been. After escaping the violence that was her family, she would’ve been on the run ever since, avoiding people who wanted to kill her. Namely my countrymen.

And me.

Guilt flooded my veins. I’d been just as intent to find and eliminate the last of the Graykey clan as my king had been. All I’d seen from them were soulless murderers who wanted to create mass mayhem.

But they had to have souls, didn’t they? Because one of them was now my soulmate.

An acidic churn filled my stomach. It sucked learning just how wrong I’d been. The Graykeys might’ve done some terrible things, but they were still people. It was wrong to paint them all with the same brush. They should’ve at least been given a chance to prove they were willing to do anything—like Quilla had—to evade the dark side of the curse.

If she knew all the ways I’d helped contain her family curse, she’d never forgive me.

“Stop it,” she growled suddenly.

I blinked. “Stop what?”

“Stop doing that thing you’re doing with your eyes.”

My eyes? What the hell were my eyes doing? I reached up, a little worried they were bleeding, just as Melaina’s had a few minutes before. But they were dry and blood-free. The only thing they’d been doing was looking at her.

Glowering, she pointed the tip of her knife at me. “You might have physically caught up to me with this little chase you have going, but you’ll never woo me into your good graces. Not with anything you say, anything you do, and certainly not with how hard you stare your pretty-boy blue eyes and long, sweeping lashes my way. Because I’m immune to them. This is one pursuit you won’t win. So just stop now.”

Ahh. So my stare had unsettled her, had it? And she was most definitely not immune.

A grin quirked my lips. “I should probably warn you not to challenge me that way; it just makes me determined to prove you wrong.”

Her dagger made another appearance. “Come near me, and I stab.”

“I’m hungry,” Melaina cut in, suddenly appearing at Holly’s side. “Let’s make camp and get something in our bellies since we rode right through lunch. I’m not used to skipping meals.”

Huffing out a breath, Quilla narrowed her eyes on her aunt and pointed my way. “I don’t like him here.”

“Dear God,” her aunt groaned, rolling her eyes. “Not this again.”

“You know,” I spoke up, clearing my throat. “If you weren’t so intent to hate me on principle alone, you might be shocked to learn I’m not that terrible of a person.”

I was willing to look past a lot of shit in order to get to know her, in fact.

“We talked about this, dearest,” Melaina added from my old horse as she dismounted. “He’s useful. For you.”

Quilla sputtered out a snort, hopping to the ground as well. “Useful? How? So far, all he’s done is slow us down, talk too much, giving me a headache, and now he’s going to eat all our food.”

“I actually have my own food,” I felt the need to impart. Just because I knew it would annoy her. “It’s in my pack on the horse your aunt stole from me.”

Her eyes narrowed at me as if she were imagining all the most-painful ways to kill me.

Melaina sighed. “What’s the real problem here, dearest?”

“He keeps looking at me.”

My eyebrows rose.

She seemed to realize how telling her words were a moment later, and a dark, angry flush flooded her face.

“That’s because he wants to fuck you,” her aunt answered, making me choke on my surprise. “Don’t you know that when a love mark first finds its human’s mate, it fills the one bearing that mark with an unquenchable desire to immediately mount their partner?”

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