Page 8 of Wicked Vows (Cursed Darkness (DarkHallow Academy) #1)

Lysithea

T he silence Dathan leaves behind is louder than the fight. Everyone is staring. They see the brand he placed on me, invisible but heavy as iron. His .

My hands are shaking from the effort of not screaming this whole fucking building into rubble.

“Carry on,” Starscream snaps. “Nothing to see here.”

Nothing to see. Nope. Just me being oppressed by a fucking dickhead who thinks he is some hotshot. Belongs to him . The indignation fires up my engines as Starscream hands me my dagger back and steers me in the direction of Reena, a vampire whose fangs glisten when she grins at me.

My magic surges, a low, angry hum that makes the weapons on the racks vibrate, but does no harm to anyone except me. I taste the blood, and I stop. A few students flinch back.

Fucking Dathan. He didn’t save me. He put me in a smaller, more elegant cage. He painted a target on my back for the entire academy to see. But that look in his eyes when I was on top of him... It was hunger. Pure, possessive hunger.

I replay the moment. The hard muscle beneath me.

The unmistakable pressure of his cock against my pussy.

He wanted me to feel it. He wanted me to know he could take me right there and then if he chose to.

I shudder as I still feel his hands on my hips.

His hand in mine as I dragged him forward.

I wipe it on my joggers and face Reena, who is already lunging at me.

Her fangs are the last thing I see before I drop and roll, the swish of her rapier missing my ear by an inch. Vampires are fast. Annoyingly so. She’s on me again before I’ve even found my footing, the tip of her blade a silver blur aimed at my throat.

“Dathan’s new pet,” she sneers, her movements fluid and deadly. “Let’s see if you bleed as pretty as you look.”

The word ‘pet’ ignites the last of my control. It also tells me all I need to know about how Reena feels about Dathan. That alone is enough to inspire me to end this as the winner. It’s irrational, and I hate that I feel this way, but it’s there anyway.

I don’t try to block. I can’t. Instead, I lunge forward, inside her guard, slamming my shoulder into her stomach. The move is clumsy, born of pure desperation, but it works. She stumbles back with a surprised grunt, her rapier arm flailing for balance.

I don’t give her time to recover. I bring my dagger up in a vicious arc, aiming for the hilt of her weapon. The steel rings as my blade smashes against her knuckles. She hisses, her hand flying open instinctively. The rapier clatters to the stone floor.

I kick it away, my chest heaving. We stand there for a second, two predators in a stalemate. Her fangs are bared, her eyes glowing with fury.

But the fight is over. I disarmed her.

Starscream grunts, a sound that might pass for approval in a species that communicates primarily through violence. “Good. Next.”

Reena snarls, snatching her rapier from the floor. The look she gives me is a promise of future pain. I just stare back, my face a blank mask. Let her try. Today, I’ve run out of fucks to give.

I walk away from the centre of the pit, my muscles screaming in protest. Every student I pass either turns away or watches me with a new kind of calculation. I’m no longer just the weirdo Nox Siren. I’m Dathan’s weirdo Nox Siren. A protected asset. A claimed territory.

It makes me want to vomit.

When the class is finally dismissed, I bolt. I need space. Somewhere the walls don’t feel like they’re closing in, somewhere I can breathe air that doesn’t taste of blood and arrogance.

I make my way to the nightmare gardens, the one place most students avoid. The thorned roses twist as I approach, their screaming faces turning to watch me. The weeping willows drip their bloody tears onto the path.

It feels like home.

A shadow detaches itself from the trunk of a malformed apple tree, and my heart thumps.

Evren.

He stares at me with those cold eyes, but they are anything but dead. They hold a world of knowledge. Of endings seen and catalogued. He isn’t hungry like Dathan. He’s something else. He’s patient.

He doesn’t move closer, just watches me with that unnerving stillness.

A predator that doesn’t need to chase its prey.

The air around him grows colder, the bloody tears of the willow tree freezing into crimson icicles before they hit the ground.

It peaks my nipples under my baggy tee, and I resist the urge to cross my arms over my chest to hide them from him.

Slowly, he raises a hand. It’s bone-white, the skin stretched thin over his knuckles.

He reaches out to one of the screaming roses, his fingers brushing against a thorned petal.

The flower’s silent shriek dies in its throat.

Its petals curl inward, turning from a violent red to a bruised, deathly black.

He plucks the dead rose from its stem and holds it out to me. An offering. A threat. A message I don’t understand.

I don’t move. I don’t take it. My heart hammers against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the sudden silence of the garden. He takes a single, soundless step forward, and I flinch back.

His expression doesn’t change. He simply places the blackened rose on a stone bench between us, a stark funeral offering against the grey stone. Then, without another glance, he turns and melts back into the shadows he came from, leaving me alone with the silence and the dead flower.

They say he is a bone harbinger. Resurrected two years ago on these very grounds where he died. By whom? Nobody knows. Not even him, they say. What omen is he bringing to me? What does the dead rose signify? Am I reading too much into this? Probably.

My hand trembles as I reach for the rose. The petals are cold with the profound, absolute cold of the grave. The moment my fingers touch it, the entire flower dissolves into a fine black dust that clings to my skin.

This is his power. Life force manipulation. He touches things and they cease to be. Was he showing me what happens to things that get in his way? Or was it a promise of what he intends to do to me?

I gulp and back out of the gardens. I’m not in the headspace to deal with cryptic bullshit from him. I’ve got my own mysteries to solve. Ones that might actually tell me who I am, where I came from, and what the flying fuck I’m supposed to do when I’m thrust back out into a world that hates me.

Stumbling back into the building, I see Blackgrove watching me. He does that sometimes. I don’t take it personally. He watches everyone at some point.

When a gargoyle jumps down in front of me with a screech of stone, I scream, shattering the eardrums and blood vessels of everyone around me, except Blackgrove. The cacophony of wails and fear as I stumble backwards until my back hits the obsidian wall, is overwhelming.

Dathan appears like a wraith, feeding from the fear with his eyes closed and a smile curving up his too-sexy lips.

“What the hell?” I growl at the gargoyle. “Don’t you know better than to scare the shit out of me?”

He simply stares at me and moves on, seemingly unaware of the chaos he has caused, which could’ve smashed him into a thousand pieces. Why didn’t it? He was right in front of me, facing me, absorbing the scream.

I drag my gaze back to Blackgrove. He is still watching. No expression, no reaction. He is the only one in the blast radius who isn’t bleeding. Apart from me, of course.

Was it a test? A fucking experiment to measure my response time. My destructive radius. What?

Dathan glides through the carnage like it’s a victory parade held in his honour. He stops in front of me, his silver eyes glowing with second-hand terror. He looks high on it.

“That was exquisite,” he breathes, his voice a low, intimate murmur that makes the hairs on my arms stand up. “You taste of righteous panic.”

I want to hit him. I want to scream in his face until his head explodes.

“Orderlies,” Blackgrove’s voice slices through the air, devoid of any emotion. “See to the students.” He doesn’t spare a glance for the bleeding, whimpering bodies. His gaze is fixed on me. A collector admiring a rare, volatile specimen.

“Your control is improving,” he says, as if commenting on the weather. “But your trigger is far too sensitive. We will need to work on that.”

Work on it. Like I’m a faulty weapon they need to recalibrate.

I just stare back, my throat raw, my magic a bitter acid in my veins.

“Expect more things to jump out at you,” Dathan murmurs, following Blackgrove’s form as he disappears.

“Like you?” I hiss.

“Oh, I don’t need to jump out to scare you. All I have to do is this…” He reaches out and brushes the back of his fingers along my arm,

I jump back like I’ve been scalded. “Do not touch me.”

“You touched me first, remember?”

“Yes. I touched you. That’s different.” I lift my chin higher, daring him to contradict me.

He doesn’t.

Instead, something like understanding floods his gaze. He sees the distinction I’m making. My touch is agency, his is a violation, and he finds it absolutely delicious.

“Well, I guess I will have to work harder to get you to touch me.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” I murmur, leaning forward, all fear of this outlier gone now. He is a monster like me, but instead of wishing to fade into oblivion, he is pushing the boundaries to find his place.

His smile spreads across his face like a beautiful stain. “Oh, I am. I’m wishing very, very hard.”

His silver eyes drop to my lips. For a terrifying second, I think he’s going to kiss me.

The broken, self-destructive part of me wants him to.

I shove the thought down, disgusted with myself.

It’s been too long since I had the attention of a man, over two years ago, before I killed him with my scream of pleasure while he was buried inside me.

What a fucking way to go, right? Blackgrove didn’t even mention it.

We simply all moved on as if it had never happened.

I step back, breaking the spell. The moans of the injured students finally cut through the haze of our confrontation.

“I have class,” I say, turning my back on him. A deliberate dismissal. A risk.

His low chuckle follows me down the corridor, a sound that crawls under my skin and stays there. “I’ll be waiting,” he calls after me, his voice dripping with promises I don’t want to understand.

My next class is Alchemical Theory. It’s in the lower dungeons, a place that smells of sulphur and failed experiments. The irony isn’t lost on me. I feel like a failed experiment they’re trying to understand.

I slide into my seat at the back, the stone cold through my joggers. The lecturer drones on about the transmutation of soul-silver, but I can’t focus. Dathan’s words echo in my head. I’m wishing very, very hard.

The professor drones on about base metals and noble souls, but his voice is just a background hum to the screaming in my own head. My fingers trace the scorch marks on my textbook cover. One for every time I’ve lost control this term in this class alone. It’s covered.