Total pages in book: 248
Estimated words: 236909 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1185(@200wpm)___ 948(@250wpm)___ 790(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 236909 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1185(@200wpm)___ 948(@250wpm)___ 790(@300wpm)
“Then what were you doing? Striving to be the most difficult person I’ve ever crossed paths with?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly it. Not that I was actually trying to save you, you jackass!”
Nyktos went completely still and silent, and I realized my mistake right then. His chest rose sharply against my back. “You couldn’t have—no, Sera. No.”
I felt the moment the shock hit him. His arm loosened around my waist, and I knew it was my chance—my last chance.
Digging the heels of my boots into the ground, I launched myself upward, breaking his hold. I was free for a heartbeat before Nyktos caught my left forearm. Cursing, I twisted as he moved to sit up, clamping my knees onto his hips. He caught the thick braid hanging over my shoulder as I thrust the dagger down.
Nyktos’s eyes went wide as I pressed the edge of the blade under his chin. My hand didn’t shake. No part of me on the outside did. The inside was a different story—everything in there trembled.
“Let me go,” I ordered.
Moonlight-bright eyes locked onto mine. “No.”
“You need to let me go, Nyktos.”
“Or what?” One side of his lips curled up. “You’re going to slit my throat?”
Frustration and hopelessness crashed into a bitter tide of desperation and anger. “If that’s what it takes.”
“Then do it. Slit my throat.” He wrapped the braid around his hand, putting just enough pressure on my neck to force my head down toward his. “Just make sure you cut deep. To the spine. Otherwise, all you’ll accomplish is getting us both bloody.”
My heart lurched. He couldn’t be serious.
“Do it,” he growled, his lips peeling back over his fangs. “Severing my spine is the only opportunity you’ll get to make a run for it.”
A tremor hit my arm, and I swallowed a gasp as he lifted his head. A bead of shimmery, reddish-blue blood appeared on the side of his throat.
“But you’d better run fast. Because I won’t be down long,” he warned, those wildly churning eyes never leaving mine. “You’ll have about a minute. If that. But just so you know, you won’t make it out of the Shadowlands, liessa.”
Liessa.
It didn’t just mean Queen in old Primal language. It also meant something beautiful. Something powerful. Hearing him call me that rocked me.
Nyktos struck then.
Grasping the hand that held the dagger, he flipped me with such shocking ease that it was clear he could’ve done it at any moment.
“That wasn’t fair,” I cried out.
He came down over me within a heartbeat, trapping me. “What about me makes you think I’m fair?”
“Everything.” Panic was a strange thing, sucking away one’s strength one moment and giving near godlike power the next. I lifted my hips and clamped my legs down on his waist. I rolled him and popped to my feet with a shout, then jumped back, turning.
A low rumble from the sky shook the bare branches of the remaining trees, rattling them like dry bones. I looked up, catching only a brief glimpse of blackish-gray wings through the slowly drifting ash. Nektas. My heart seized—
Nyktos rose to one knee, twisting as he swept out his leg, catching mine. My feet went out from under me, and I hit the ground on my ass. Nyktos was fast—so damn fast. He rolled onto me again, but this time, he was smarter. One broad thigh wedged between mine as he captured both of my wrists, pinning them to the dry, dead grass as the shadow of a draken glided above us, coasting over the circle of land Nyktos had cleared in his rage.
“Drop it.” Eather spilled from Nyktos’s eyes and seeped under his skin, illuminating his veins as a thin trickle of blood coursed down his throat. “Drop the dagger, Sera. I don’t want to make you do it, but I will. Drop it.”
He could do just that, using compulsion. Panting, I forced my grip to relax. The hilt of the dagger slipped from my palm. It was over. Even if I managed to get free and somehow incapacitated Nyktos, I wouldn’t make it far. Not with Nektas in the air. “Happy?”
His eyes became pure silver with no discernible pupil—just glowing orbs. Those essence-lit veins continued spreading over his cheek and down his throat. In an instant, the minor wound there was gone. Only the faint trace of blood remained. “Tell me I’m wrong, Sera.”
My muscles went weak and my neck limp.
The essence bled out around him in thick tendrils of black laced with silver. Shadows churned under his skin. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me!” he shouted, the shadows spreading until his flesh was the color of midnight streaked with starlight, and the fingers around my wrists became as hard as shadowstone. “Tell me you were not going after Kolis!”
“I had to.”
“Wrong,” he snarled, the flash of fangs a shocking white against his skin.