Page 11 of Divine Fate (Cursed Legacies #4)
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CRYPT
It starts as it always does.
I walk unseen through a crowd of motley, nondescript auras. They’re bland compared to the aura surrounding the riveting girl on the stage, the one I’m drawn to. Her aura is the very same enticingly rich, shimmering dark mauve that brought me back to Everbound in the first place.
When I step into the mortal realm and see her face to face for the first time, I’m changed.
I’m hers.
She’s mine.
Those breathtakingly intelligent eyes carry haunting secrets that tantalize me from the start. Without a word spoken between us, I feel it—that there is something in the fabric of her being that is precisely what my own soul is comprised of.
That’s not all I feel. I’ve removed the walls I put up so long ago, and now every emotion I experience in her presence is fresh. Exhilarating. Even when she attempts to reject us, it’s thrillingly unexpected.
Observing her becomes an addiction. I watch her micro-expressions day by day, enjoying the smallest of insights into my dark darling’s beautiful mind. I become obsession personified, relishing every moment I have with my keeper before my curse catches up with me.
There’s no escape.
Discovering what happiness feels like is incomparable.
That’s how it always starts.
But then, the agony begins. Every night, I witness the nightmares that plague her as permanent psychological scars. The screaming. The experiments. The conditioning.
The time she trusted a boy who took what he wanted from her before trying to take her life.
I never tell her what I’ve seen of her past in the memories that torment her nights. How could I? My keeper survived things I wish I could make her forget. I’ll never remind her of them by breathing a word about it ever again.
There’s no escape.
In this purgatory, numbing myself is my only defense. Yet even that is becoming useless.
Our quintet grows closer. We learn about her blood oath and her purpose. She says she knows how to survive it all in the end.
It’s a lie. I know that just as she knows that my minutes are ticking away with my curse, bringing me closer to the Beyond.
But I don’t fear my curse, or death.
I fear being without her. I fear existing as that numb nothingness that I was before finding a soul as broken as mine. I fear losing what precious time I have left with her.
And that’s precisely what happens in this cycle I live on repeat.
Every breath between us in this endless cycle is something I would die to have back. Every smile and argument and whisper and kiss?—
Until the moment I see her lifeless on a barren battlefield. Gone.
I was going to ask her to be my muse.
Dulling every emotion isn’t working anymore, because even the numbness hurts. The cycle starts over as I’m forced to relive it all, along with my bitter past.
Again. And again. And again.