Page 65 of Mark of Love (Love Mark 3)

“Of course I know,” I growled, pressing the hilts of my daggers against his collarbone to shove him away. As soon as he stepped back, I lowered the blades and sheathed them with a huff. “I saw my family tear each other apart. My own mother stabbed my brother to save me, while my father charged her, only for his brother to murder him. I saw my grandfather’s head roll across the floor and my cousins claw out each other’s eyes with their bare hands. I know exactly what the curse does.”

“God.” He winced.

He reached for my arm with his manacled hands, his eyes full of sympathy and hurt. I stepped back, avoiding him.

“But I took steps to make sure I couldn’t add to the damage. I shed my magic, I closed my womb, and you know what? High Cliff warriors still try to track me down to this day. To capture or kill me.”

With a solemn nod, he admitted, “That doesn’t seem fair.”

“No shit,” I muttered. “Because what about Quo and Quart who were killed? Did anyone stop to ask if they were willing to go through the same measures that I did to help stop the spread and avoid execution?”

“I doubt it.”

His honesty kept startling me. I would’ve thought a guy trying to get into a woman’s good graces wouldn’t be so quick to confess something he knew would piss her off. But then, a part of me appreciated his bold, ugly truth. He would never lie to me, would he?

Dammit. That didn’t matter. I pushed my palms against his chest. He backed another step away, letting me have the small distance, but I only used it to get back into his face and be the aggressor.

“So, what?” I charged. “It’s just easier to kill before we could do anything wrong than ask us a simple question first?”

“No,” he murmured and shook his head. “It probably had more to do with the fact that no one else even considered the idea.”

“How in God’s name could you not consider something so logical and right?”

With a shrug, he said, “Ignorance. Fear. Revenge. A lot of High Clifters lost family members because of the aftereffects of a reaping. Hell, I doubt I’d be the sole survivor to House Moast right now if it weren’t for the Graykeys.” His eyes went sad and pained as he searched my face. “It’s hard to look past pain and hurt and anger sometimes and just calm down enough to realize you’re not putting a stop to something with your extreme reaction; you’re only making it worse.”

“Oh, so you’re having a sudden change of heart?” People didn’t change their opinions that easily, and if they did, how could they be considered in any way dependable.

“I don’t know about a complete change of heart,” he told me with a wince. “Something’s still got to be done about the curse, but there could be some better, smarter ways to go about it. I like the idea of trying to compromise and talk it out first.” Then he lifted a finger. “Except when it comes to Qualmer Graykey. I’m sorry if you’re close to him, but if I ever cross paths with him—”

“Then you’ll have to wait in line behind me to kill him,” I said.

Qualmer and I had never gotten on, not even when he wasn’t consumed by bloodlust. He’d been a bully who’d tormented me, killed every pet I ever had, called me awful names, and even tried to molest me once before Melaina had discovered us and saved my virtue.

Across the camp, the High Clifter frowned at me in confusion.

“I also have a score to settle with that specific Graykey,” I reported, lifting my chin a notch higher. “Qualmer killed my mother too.”

Chapter 15

Quilla

Indigo hadn’t been lying. Graykeys really had murdered most of his family.

And don’t ask me when I’d started thinking of him as Indigo. The more I’d read his journal, the more he’d become Indigo.

But I wasn’t going to let him know that just yet.

His family history was almost as sad as my own. His parents had been killed during the tenth reaping, just as mine had. His great-grandparents were assassinated in the ninth reaping. A distant Moast uncle and cousin were slain in the Great Lowden War following the eleventh reaping. Then his grandmother and beloved grandpa had died in a highly questionable accident by members of King Orick’s royal procession when they’d been traveling to High Cliff to sign a treaty, which never got around to being signed.

He really had no love lost for my people.

And yet revenge wasn’t his driving force. He might’ve kept impeccable records about the Graykeys and was still keeping track of them, but it didn’t take me long to realize Earth was his main obsession.

From his notes, I realized his great-grandmother had been switched here from Earth when some Graykey had taken an amulet through the portal eighty-three years ago. He called the earthlings who were pulled here to take the place of a Graykey going there Replacements. Made sense to me, so I shrugged, going with it.

The more he wrote about the stories his grandfather told him about her, the more I realized I knew who he was talking about. Her disappearance had been legendary on Earth when I had visited, even all those years after her disappearance. The urge to tell Indigo what I knew about her filled my tongue, but I swallowed it back.

He’d love to hear what I knew, so I couldn’t tell him. I was still mad over learning about his involvement in tracking my people down. But I wanted to tell him, which made everything worse.

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