“Luring you was harder than anticapted,” Azriel grinned, malice curling its sharp edges and curving his words. “You’re a hard woman to find, Anala Crux, it intrigues me. You intrigue me.”

His strong hand rises to my face, tanned fingers still dripping warm blood as his fingers caress the air above my cheek with that sadistic bare of his teeth. It takes all of me not to flinch, not to step back and snarl the forbidden curses that had rolled off of Mora’s tongue so easily. He looses a breath, shaky and deranged and teetering along a giggle.

“Well, I’m here now.” I sneered in lieu of the dread churning my chest.

“Yes,” He purred, his fingers twitching at my searing cheeks. “And what a prize you are.”

Prize? Is that what this was to him… a game? We were just chess pieces moving along a checkered board, waiting for our turn to brutally slain and buried along its outer-edges. We were nothing, meant nothing. Not me; not Mora; not Milo. No one. Arden was right — Azriel was an irredeemable, flaming piece of hell-raised shit.

“Prize?” I grit through tightly clenched teeth. “I am not your prize, Azriel Vustragae.”

Azriel pauses, demented grin faltering. His green eyes flecked with rage and surged with keening shock, but they don’t glow, don’t illuminate a deep, glistening crimson like Kellan told they always did when he felt anything. I wonder fleetingly, if Azriel wasn’t as invincible as we’d all been living like he was, as unfairly powerful.

He recovers quickly, the corners of his narrow eyes crinkling with his chesire smile. “There it is,” He breathed. “That fight, that… wit that I was promised.” Azriel steps forward, so close his breath tickles the bridge of my nose and his forehead hovers over mine. His hand drops onto my shoulder, heavy like a ragged rock, and squeezes lightly.

I roll the joint and jerk backwards, trying to get his spindly, bloody touch far far away. Azriel follows and presses closer. His gaze is hooded and seethes satisfaction. “Promised?”

His hum is gravelly and resounds through the clearing with the same withering intensity of the Bozaite only minutes before. His eyes follow the crease of my scowl. “By Kellan.” He rumbles. “By the little warrior you were so fond of. By June, by Arius, by the faeries and the people.”

The disgust licks through me as he lists of their names — names of people who had fought valiantly and subcame to grusome, brutal fates for freedom’s will; for me. It flourishes, and flows, and overtakes until there’s nothing left for me to do but feel it with all its suffocating gravity, stopped only by a groaning dam. But underneath it is a river of thick rage, gnashing its knife through my vining tendons and bleeding a mournful longing. Longing for all of those lost lives, forgotten stories.

“By Mora.” Azriel whispers. I sneer deeper. “She put up the hardest fight. Slashing her sword through the air with more passion than I’ve seen in so long, spitting curses every chance she had. She was good, she would have made a great addition to my people — too bad you got your grips in her first. Passion, bravery and wit; what a rare combination.”

“Fuck you.” I snarl, more animal than human, more fae than myself. Azriel goes on, as unaffected by raw displays of supernatural as I’d come to be.

“Of course,” He shrugs a muscled shoulder, his sharpened, white canines gleaming against the kaleidoscoping, golden rays peaking through the trees. “Her wits were no match to my blade.”

The creaking levee snaps, bursting at the seams with molten fury.