“No,” I say softly. “I’m your destruction.”
Chapter Two
“They sent you to destroy me?” he asks, his tone tinged with dark, soulless humor. “You are nothing.”
“I’m your death, monster.”
“You’re a smidge on the pages of history,” he says.
I refuse to let him rattle me. Because of my small size and slender build, I’ve been underestimated my entire life, and this thing is no different.
But his misjudging who and what I am is something I know I can use to my advantage. “Cursed One, you’re under divine sanction. Your hunt ends tonight.”
He laughs. “Ends? My dear, it hasn’t even begun.”
His power skims over my skin, unsettlingly intimate. Goosebumps rise, but I hold my aim steady even as my pulse betrays me. The stories never said his voice could sound so rich and seductive, like temptation itself.
My training allows me the distance I’m sure his victims have no hope of finding, because the pull is real. Any mortal would be drawn to him.
Any. My mind allows me to see an unappetizing truth. He might have a magnetism beyond the normal, but he’s also dangerously attractive.
It’s an air of accessibility I know is not real.
Still… Even I can marvel at the tragic beauty of him, at how much he looks like a masterpiece abandoned by its creator. Divine once but fractured now. And all the more appealing because of it. That damaged perfection.
But it doesn’t matter.
Ending him is all that matters, and I need to time my shot.
“It ends. Tonight.”
“A female hunter.” The creature tilts his head. “How foolish to send you here to face me, the devourer of hearts. A trembling mortal girl.”
I grit my teeth. “I don’t tremble.”
He chuckles. “Not yet.”
I take a cautious step forward, heart hammering. The closer I get, the more I feel it—the pull, the ache, the…wrongness. My bow feels heavier in my hands as I lift it.
I steady myself, let my training blank it all out. Now the bow is sure. It’s part of me.
I release the arrow.
It flies true. The silver glints through the red night, but the instant before it hits its mark, he vanishes. The arrow strikes the tree where he’d just stood and embeds into the wood.
His laughter drifts around me again, closer this time. “You missed.”
I spin, but he’s already gone. How…? Only the faintest shimmer lingers in the air where he passed, like heat rising off desert sand.
I curse under my breath and draw another arrow. The trees creak. Somewhere above, wings beat and wind pushes down on me. And then, nothing.
He’s toying with me.
I force my breathing to steady. “If you want me dead, come and try your luck.”
A pause. Then, softly, “I don’t want you dead.”
The words shouldn’t sound like a promise. But they do.
