MARK OF LOVE (Lovemark #3)

9. Indigo-2

“Well, I don’t give a s**t about you, so…” She shrugged nonchalantly. “Nope. Not curious.”

I squinted at her. Her expression was completely apathetic. But a little jump in her pulse, this spurt of fear, anxiety, and guilt that came through my mark, projecting from her, told me she was lying.

So I leaned toward her and whispered, “Bullshit.”

She arched me a dry glance. “Excuse me?”

With a careless shrug, I answered, “I’m just not buying it, is all. You want to know about me, too. I know you do.”

“Whatever,” she spat, returning her attention to the road, and lifting her chin a notch higher. “Like I care what you think, anyway.”

“Someday,” I murmured, studying her intently. “I bet you will. I bet you’ll care a lot.”

The gush of unease that wafted off her told me she was afraid I might be right. I frowned, wondering why she was so afraid to fall in love with me, anyway. Because that was it, I realized. She was scared. Of love.

In any other situation, I could get that. Love was scary s**t. You put yourself out there with no guarantee the other person would feel the same. You risked receiving the worst possible kind of rejection.

But that was the thing about love marks. They were the guarantee, before you ever spoke to or got to know that person. It was like a fail-safe sign that you’d just met the one who would never reject you.

Not being born of High Cliff, however, that fact must be hard for her to fully believe.

“Quilla,” I murmured, shifting my mount closer to hers and lowering my voice to a confidential level, to be sensitive to her worries and concerns. “I know this is overwhelming. It’s a lot to take in, for sure. It’s freaking me out too, I assure you. I mean, my entire life just changed. In the blink of an eye. But please trust me when I say it’s not something we have to fear. At all.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“Yes, you are,” I countered softly. “But you don’t have to be.”

I reached out with my shackled hands for a lock of her hair that was fluttering in the light drifts of breeze, just to learn what it felt like. But before making contact, she swung out with a dagger she had clutched in her hand. And the blade sliced open the length of my palm.

“Oww.” Hissing in a breath, I pulled my bound hands back to my side and curled my fingers into a fist to stanch the pain.

Quilla gripped the bloody knife threateningly. “Next time you try to touch me, I’ll cut off the entire damn hand, got it?”

“I got it. Jesus.” Glancing down, I watched blood seep through the cracks in my fingers. “Sorry.”

Next to me, a riot of emotions zinged through my true love: remorse, fear, anger, sorrow, hope, fear again.

The woman had no idea how to deal with her feelings. Violence must be her default response to push down anything resembling emotion that tried to rise to the surface.

I looked up, wondering what kind of life she must’ve had. Her childhood couldn’t have been easy. Hell, I can’t imagine any part of her life had been. After escaping the violence that was her family, she would’ve been on the run ever since, avoiding people who wanted to kill her. Namely my countrymen.

And me.

Guilt flooded my veins. I’d been just as intent to find and eliminate the last of the Graykey clan as my king had been. All I’d seen from them were soulless murderers who wanted to create mass mayhem.

But they had to have souls, didn’t they? Because one of them was now my soulmate.

An acidic churn filled my stomach. It sucked learning just how wrong I’d been. The Graykeys might’ve done some terrible things, but they were still people. It was wrong to paint them all with the same brush. They should’ve at least been given a chance to prove they were willing to do anything—like Quilla had—to evade the dark side of the curse.

If she knew all the ways I’d helped contain her family curse, she’d never forgive me.

“Stop it,” she growled suddenly.

I blinked. “Stop what?”

“Stop doing that thing you’re doing with your eyes.”

My eyes? What the hell were my eyes doing? I reached up, a little worried they were bleeding, just as Melaina’s had a few minutes before. But they were dry and blood-free. The only thing they’d been doing was looking at her.

Glowering, she pointed the tip of her knife at me. “You might have physically caught up to me with this little chase you have going, but you’ll never woo me into your good graces. Not with anything you say, anything you do, and certainly not with how hard you stare your pretty-boy blue eyes and long, sweeping lashes my way. Because I’m immune to them. This is one pursuit you won’t win. So just stop now.”

Ahh. So my stare had unsettled her, had it? And she was most definitely not immune.

A grin quirked my lips. “I should probably warn you not to challenge me that way; it just makes me determined to prove you wrong.”

Her dagger made another appearance. “Come near me, and I stab.”

“I’m hungry,” Melaina cut in, suddenly appearing at Holly’s side. “Let’s make camp and get something in our bellies since we rode right through lunch. I’m not used to skipping meals.”

Huffing out a breath, Quilla narrowed her eyes on her aunt and pointed my way. “I don’t like him here.”

“Dear God,” her aunt groaned, rolling her eyes. “Not this again.”

“You know,” I spoke up, clearing my throat. “If you weren’t so intent to hate me on principle alone, you might be shocked to learn I’m not that terrible of a person.”

I was willing to look past a lot of s**t in order to get to know her, in fact.

“We talked about this, dearest,” Melaina added from my old horse as she dismounted. “He’s useful. For you.”

Quilla sputtered out a snort, hopping to the ground as well. “Useful? How? So far, all he’s done is slow us down, talk too much, giving me a headache, and now he’s going to eat all our food.”

“I actually have my own food,” I felt the need to impart. Just because I knew it would annoy her. “It’s in my pack on the horse your aunt stole from me.”

Her eyes narrowed at me as if she were imagining all the most-painful ways to kill me.

Melaina sighed. “What’s the real problem here, dearest?”

“He keeps looking at me.”

My eyebrows rose.

She seemed to realize how telling her words were a moment later, and a dark, angry flush flooded her face.

“That’s because he wants to f**k you,” her aunt answered, making me choke on my surprise. “Don’t you know that when a love mark first finds its human’s mate, it fills the one bearing that mark with an unquenchable desire to immediately mount their partner?”

Quilla sliced me with a deadly glare.

“Hey, whoa!” I lifted my hands, looking particularly harmless with them bound together with chains, I thought. “I would never mount you without your permission.”

She squinted her eyes harder, letting me know my input had only made things worse, and I felt the need to flash her an innocent smile.

“I’m harmless; I swear.” Uneasily clearing my throat, I hopped off Holly, thinking I needed to get out of here before she really did stab me. “How about I be useful and gather some kindling, then get a campfire going, huh?” Lifting my fingers and wiggling them, I added, “All with my hands tied, too. I mean, unless you want to unchain me.”

She sniffed dismissively.

Yeah, I didn’t figure she’d go for that.

Whistling to myself anyway, I left the road and started toward a small cluster of trees. Neither woman seemed to care that I was going off by myself, once again proving I wasn’t a prisoner to them. And yet neither had any interest in removing my restraints either. Very odd, that.

Sighing, I busied myself with collecting tinder with my hands bound and no ax around to help matters. After cracking apart already-fallen limbs with my boot, I returned to the side of the road—my arms loaded with a fairly pathetic excuse for firewood—only to find that Quilla was still arguing her case to get rid of me.

As if I’d just leave, even if she did convince her aunt to agree with her.

“Why won’t you just listen to me? He needs to go.”

“Why?” Melaina spat.

“Lord have mercy.” Scoffing out a disgusted breath, Quilla threw up her hands. “Because I don’t want him here. Do I need another reason?”

“Got some firewood,” I announced, alerting them to my presence as I dropped the wood heavily to the ground in case they hadn’t heard me already. “So I guess I’ll just start a campfire now.”

Neither responded to me nor let on to the fact that they’d even noticed my return. They continued to glare at each other until Melaina huffed out a disgusted breath and demanded, “What do you propose we do with him, then? We already decided murder was bad. Remember? And we can’t just let him run free to tell everyone where we are. It would put you—and thus me—in mortal danger.”

I didn’t interject to let them know I would never do anything to put Quilla in mortal danger; I was pretty sure neither would care what I had to say right now. So I knelt by the wood and began to arrange it into a mini pyre, humming “Singin’ in the Rain” under my breath as I worked.

Folding her arms tightly over her chest, Quilla muttered, “I don’t care what you say, you’re not going to prove to me that keeping him around is a good idea.”

“Oh, you want proof, is that it?” Melaina lifted her eyebrows, rising to the challenge. “Fine. I’ll show you why we should keep him around. Why you should keep him.” Then she lifted her voice. “Hey, High Clifter…”

Realizing they were addressing me now and bringing me into the conversation, I straightened. “My name’s actually—”

“Don’t care,” Melaina snarled, narrowing her eyes at Quilla as she produced her own dagger. “I’m trying to prove a point here. So just shut up and help me prove it, will you?”

I’d been through enough conflicts and battles to know when a person had every intention of using their weapon. And Quilla’s aunt was going to throw that blade.

I popped to my feet, ready to defend myself, for surely she wanted to prove that I was a superior warrior who could ward off an attack, even with my hands tied. But then she glanced my way and winked, making my stomach drop with cold dread as she wound her arm back and let the blade fly.

Directly at Quilla.

“No!” My life flashed before my eyes as I dove forward, trying to shield my true love with my own body.

But this wasn’t fair. I couldn’t lose her now. I’d just met her. I hadn’t even had time to get to know her. Hell, we’d never even kissed. I’d been waiting my entire life to meet her. We needed more than one awkwardly, uncomfortable day together.

Meeting with success, I blocked the dagger, keeping it from getting anywhere near my mate as it embedded itself deep…

In my own neck.

Ah s**t. This was going to suck. Gurgling out my shock and pain, I groped at my throat, feeling the wet slick gush of blood spill over my fingers as I grappled for the hilt of the knife.

Blinking as the world grayed around me, I gasped for breath and tipped over backward to the ground.

But seriously, what the f**k was it about these women and stabbing people?