Page 268 of Cursed Evermore

I'd never met anyone whom I'd ever desired to take as my queen. Honestly, I'd thought I'd fall into an arranged marriage like most of my relatives.

Of all of us over several millennia, my parents were the luckiest. They grew up together and were always in love. Although my mother had come from House Duskryn, a house that had never married into the Royal House, it was inevitable that they'd be together.

I'd be the first Nightblade in the royal line to be with a mage in five millennia.

Elariya was a wild card I never saw coming. An ace the gods held back to bewitch me just at the moment when I least expected it.

I'd gone from doing my best to resist her, to ravenous obsession.

Graceless gods, it hadn't even been a full month yet.Weeks. Mere weeks. And this was what she’d done to me.

I'd claimed her, but she never knew she had me at hello. Right from that moment she looked at me through my shield in the tavern.

From there, love dipped in lethal obsession claimed me. The perfect weapon to make a being like me lose his head. And maybe his crown.

My mage still didn't know the power she held over me. So much power, it swayed me into sparing her father and agreeing to send her back to her family if we weren’t successful tomorrow and her memory reset.

Only the gods knew how much I'd hated both ideas. One felt like an injustice to my family—I didn't even know what I was going to say to Alaric yet. The other idea risked exposing what I'd worked so damn hard to keep secret from Dreynthor.

I'd already spoken to Arielle about getting Elariya back to Stormfell unnoticed. Now that she'd perfected her etherealmagic, she thought she could open a conduit on the ghost roads and portal us to Stormfell. It would be tricky, and I'd never heard of anyone attempting such a thing before, but it was doable. The problem was Elariya's family.

I still needed to tell them something. Or every fucking thing.

But… I'd do it for her.

All that emotion, and I still hadn't shared my biggest secret with Elariya.

My curse.

I'd wanted to tell her. There was every reason to come clean, but the part of me that still wanted her to see something good in me held back.

How do you tell someone that you're Death incarnate? That your touch could drain the life from her if you lost control? That loving me meant loving something fundamentally opposed to everything she represented?

I was the absence of life. The absence of hope. The absence of dreams.

The absolute antithesis of her.

I couldn't bear to see that kind of fear replace the love in her eyes.

She wanted to stay in my darkness, but Elariya didn't know just how dark that darkness truly was. And that Iwasthe darkness.

By the time I took her to see the dragons, I didn't have the heart to taint her any further.

Nothing compared to watching the joy on her face as she watched the dragons sing. We listened to them until the sun rose. Then I had to leave her, and the day went downhill quickly after that.

My hands clenched into fists as I recalled my futile efforts to uncover more information about the rebels. Then there was thefucking High Table meeting. The memory made my steps grow heavier, my boots striking the stone with increasing force.

Dreynthor announced I wouldn't be marrying Princess Seraphina, and that sparked an argument I had no patience for since it involved people who meant nothing to me.

King Paeulyn was in attendance as an honorary guest. He was predictably enraged by my decision, but not angry enough to get into an argument with me, or make any threats. No one was that foolish.

I apologized to him, only because of his years of allegiance to my father. If he were anyone else, I wouldn't have said a word. By the same token, he probably wouldn't have accepted my apology if I were someone else. He certainly would have demanded more of an explanation for my refusal to marry his most-sought-after daughter.

I'd given him a half-truth—that my uncle had gotten ahead of himself and made arrangements without my consent, and Galaythia's future king couldn't be bound by treaties he'd never agreed to. I didn't tell him or anyone else about Elariya. I didn't want any of them picking her apart. She was my choice, which meant I'd choose when they got to find out about her. Though, I was sure Dreynthor had already leaked that information.

It didn't matter. None of that mattered when my fate rested on the spell's success. Whether that was tomorrow or... another time, or never.

Using the Heartflame crystals was an idea I came up with after Arielle and Bastian tested out some dragon magic in the dead realm to track an object similar to the ring. It was one of those rogue ideas we'd come up with, but it worked better than anything else we'd done so far.