Page 105 of Slaying the Shifter Prince
I had to make him understand, even if that meant showing him the very worst of me.
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“They came for me the night my magic woke. No pitchforks or torches, but they carried lanterns through the streets, searching for the witch.” Goosebumps flooded my skin just as they had that night. “It didn’t matter that I was a little girl, because I’d…” I swallowed down the salt in my throat as it threatened to choke me. “I’d cursed a little girl.”
I couldn’t bear to look at him, but I could feel his gaze prickling me as he listened in silence.
I shook my head. “Didn’t realise Icouldcurse anyone, but I did. She laughed at me for my ragged clothes and pushed me over when she found out I had no parents. So I pointed at her and said, ‘May you get boils.’ And she did. So many. So, so many. They erupted on her face, covered her eyelids, lined her mouth. When they broke out on her eyeballs, I screamed. And that was when everyone turned and saw what I’d done.” The image of her was seared into my mind. I never drew it, because I didn’t have to.
I hugged myself tighter, like I could hug the little girl I’d cursed. “Did you know that if you get boils in your throat, you can’t breathe and you die?”
Pale, Sepher shook his head.
“Me neither.” I sank against my knees, letting my gaze slip away. “That was what happened that evening. I was ten. She was eleven and dead, thanks to my ‘gift.’” I laughed at the irony of that name for magic. “So, of course, they came to find the witch, and they carried iron. That was why we ran. That was why Zinnia filed down my teeth to hide what I was. That was how we ended up in the Gilded Suns.”
On the periphery of my vision, he moved, perhaps coming closer, but I pulled away. “What does this have to do with you having a death wish?”
“Don’t you understand?” My voice rose, rasping in my throat as my fingers bit into my legs. “If we hadn’t joined them… If we hadn’t gone to Elfhame with them… If she hadn’t given that private performance…”
A hundredifs that chewed on me day by day, but chief amongst them was one.
“IfIhadn’t let that curse loose, she would never have been killed in that alleyway.”
All this time, I’d searched for vengeance and I’d never expected to survive it.
Because deep down, I knew they were one and the same. I didn’t deserve to survive it, because it was as much my fault as it was the person who’d killed her.
There it was.
The thought I’d been running from all these years.
I’d escaped into sketchbooks and plans, into the air as I performed, into my obsession withhim. I’d used my vanity to soothe the wound where it had worked its way into my body like a splinter of glass. But hair treatments and skin lotions couldn’t patch over this wound.
Nothing could.
Because it was my fault.
I was the one who truly deserved to suffer to give my sister justice.
“You blame yourself,” he murmured into the quiet that yawned in the wake of my story.
He sat there very still, but it was the stillness of a hunter poised rather than any state of relaxation. It was the stillness that had made me wary a couple of months ago—the kind that could lash out.
A laugh came out with my next breath.
I’d been punishing myself for a decade. No wonder part of me craved his punishment.
Oh, I’d found myself a perfect partner, hadn’t I?
“Come here.” His tail patted the space between his legs.
I frowned at him, because… he didn’t look horrified. Or disgusted. He didn’t glare at me like he thought I was some awful creature for killing another child.
Maybe his handsome face was a trap. It wasn’t the first time I’d thought that. It wasn’t the first time I’d fallen for it.
This time, I did so willingly and crawled across the mattress to him.
Even before he touched me, his blazing heat reached my skin, eradicating my goosebumps. His outdoors scent curled down my throat, thick and heady, comforting and familiar. I loved these things. I loved the way they reminded me of lying in the sun with Zinnia on the hottest day of the year. How we’d withstand it as long as we could before running down the bank to the river.
