I keep walking, putting distance between us until I’m fully immersed in shadow and the noose of predatory stares. Finally I stop, my heart a hammer in my too-tight chest as I spin.
Still.
He’s standing in the spill of morning light—a pillar of robust beauty caught on the edge of uncertainty, his features shadowed by something I can’t interpret. Dressed in black leather pants and a shirt that hugs his chiseled physique, I can see every breath barrel into his broad chest.
He’s breathing faster than me …
I think he’s nervous, too.
“The Irilak feed off anything with a heartbeat. Anything but …me,” the rasp of my voice echoes through the hungry hollow between us—a chasm gored by the secrets he kept, “and the Unseelie.”
The still between us grows more fragile than the mirror I shattered.
He doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, but there’s a question in his shadowed eyes. Unlike him, I’m not going to make him wait nineteen fucking years for the answer he craves.
I reach behind my neck, and he severs the space between us with a bone-rattling growl. The Irilak flinch in tandem, like an undulating wave.
I undo the clasp, releasing the necklace.
Releasing the face of my felled species.
The jewel thunks heavily into my palm, and my skin peels down, loosening me from its crushing squeeze, leaving me bare in the ways that matter. A fragile rose exposed to his violent, snipping stare as I toss the necklace into the empty space between us, and it lands with a thud amongst the underbrush.
A beat passes. Another.
I lift my chin. Look down my nose at him.
Challengehim.
He drops his head, and his chest inflates as a savage rumble rattles free—reminiscent of the sounds the ground makes when an earthquake strikes.
The storm in my stomach churns.
Cracking his neck from side to side, he crunches his fists, upper lip twitching. Slowly, he lifts his head, looking at me through thick shreds of hair, the swirl of his silver eyes turning matte black.
A violent energy radiates off him, rippling the air between us and electrifying my skin, making it pebble.
His foot lifts, and my heart stops, then starts again in a frenzied array of beats that chase each other for traction.
He sets his boot down over the line.
No.
Another step, and there’s a swirl of scurrying darkness as the Irilak drift back …
Please no.
All the silver bleeds from his hair to match his ebony gaze that fades into the skin around his eyes, and his tattoos ignite with flickering, slashing bolts of light, like there’s an electric storm caught within their scrawled confines.
His features harden.
Sharpen.
The tapered tips of his ears peak out from thick, inky locks, and his muscles swell, chest broadens, his face carving into something transcendent—a brutal beauty that feels lethal to look upon, like he’s borne from the dark space between the stars that bears no life. A hollow, never-ending blackness.
An eternal fall I just slipped into.
The Irilak shy away from his presence, shrinking like shadows squashed by the rising sun.
