Page 6

Daxeel pushes back one step. His throat bobs and, after a long breath that he draws in through his nose, he spits words at me like they are as low as me, as dirty as he thinks I am: “This Quiet, I will have you. Dress nice for your master.” He uses that word against me, one I spoke with the same mocking venom.

Then he leaves.

The command strikes through me. I feel it in my bones.

Dress nice…

The message is more than that. The message he leaves me with is one thing only.

I own you, Nari.

It’s no lie.

He does own me.

In more ways that he might realise, and in more twisted ways I care to admit.

I am Daxeel’s slave.

3

the night I chose the dark

††† TEN YEARS EARLIER †††

The torn bark of the oak tree scratches at my spine.

“They have invaded our field too long. Will this ghastly Eclipse end already? If it is not over now, then it is not soon enough.”

I slump against the tree.

Arms folded over my middle, I hug stacks of parchment and folded star maps to my chest.

“Look at them, theirarrogance.” I can practically hear Lilith’s lip curl over her teeth. “Hiding in the shade but crushingourgrass.”

Idly, my thumb toys with the curled edge of parchment.

Lilith sucks in a sharp breath before her hushed tone hitches into a squeak of outrage. “Did you see that? He kicked it. Heintentionallykilled that darling flower.”

I listen as Lilith hisses under her breath from the next tree over, but my attention is on the ones she is in a twist about: the dark ones. Dokkalves young enough to attend our lessons in the night—those who aren’t yet full warriors or in their chosen careers.

In these efforts of friendship between our kinds, for the treaty, the dark ones infiltrate our field.

And not everyone is pleased about it.

I am less slighted by their presence.

I watch them.

Some prowl in the shade beneath the oak trees across the glade. Their boots are silent on the blades of grass they crush under their weight, their leathers melted into the wispy dark of night, but not a full darkness, not like the one they belong to. Our night is speckled with bright stars and a gleaming moon so close to our lands that, when I was a youngling, I believed Pandora when she teased that if I jumped high enough I could one day touch the surface.

I tried that more often than I’d like to admit. Jumped on the tips of hills, the peaks of towers, stretched my arms up too high from the tips of trees.

Suppose that’s how I came to love heights as I do. Suppose that’s how I came to be the climber I am.

I don’t see the dark ones doing such silly things. I don’t seehimbelieving such silly things.

Daxeel.