Page 74 of Empire of Dark
{ DAMEN }
Fuck.
The blade of my sword on her arm, I looked at Ada, all the blood draining from my face.
Frozen.
A bead of sweat trickled down her brow, curving outward to seep along her temple. Sweat I’d put there after going at her hard during a training bout on a craggy outcropping of stone high above the castle on the mountain. While Ada had been teaching Venetia the basics of fighting with a blade during the last few weeks, they had been going about it slowly, methodically.
Not nearly hard enough to keep the energy in Ada’s body flowing freely. So she still needed to go hard at actual training every few days.
And who was I to deny her?
But this.
My blade pressing into her skin—it stopped my heart in my chest.
I’d lost control, lost sight of where her next move would be and I forgot who I was fighting, only that I was thick in battle.
My sword had hit her forearm—brutally—and I was sure I’d broken the bone underneath. On anyone else, my blade wouldhave easily sliced clean through her arm, severing the limb. Instead, her bizarre armor skin not only stopped the blade from slicing through her skin, it stopped me from cracking the bone underneath.
The sight of my blade pressing on her skin—nothing had ever pierced through my chest like this. Nothing had ever exploded a truth so pure and certain out through every nerve in my body.
The thought of anything happening to her—by my hand or by anyone else’s—it both killed and enraged me. Enraged me to a point where I would tear down this world, and then the next, to keep her safe.
Her green eyes, bright today like sprigs of springtime honeysuckle, lifted from looking down at the blade on her arm.
She smiled.
One simple, innocent action and that was it for me.
Everything in my world, in my mind, crystallized into excruciating clarity.
She was mine.
Mine.
Mine to love and fuck and make smile and protect and set my hands on to take away the pain when it got to be too much for her.
She was mine.
Not that she would take kindly to that thought. She wasn’t anyone’s.
So I kept it to myself.
I heaved a breath and lifted my sword—which suddenly felt like a thousand pounds of soul-pulverizing regret—from her outstretched arm.
Her smile went wider. “I was wondering when you would finally make contact. I’ve been trying for weeks now to make that happen.”
I stared at her, stunned into silence for a long second. “You wanted me to strike you?”
“Desperately.”
“Why in the hell would you do that to me?” There was no hiding the vicious growl in my voice.
Her brows drew together for the smallest of moments and then she nodded, the grin still playing about her lips. “I know you didn’t believe it—you probably still don’t. But this”—she held up her left arm where a fading pink line marred the skin where my blade had slammed into her—“this blow was harsh and you needed to see it with your own eyes, feel it under your own hand, to prove to yourself how you cannot hurt me.”
She was right. Maddeningly so. I still treated her with kid gloves when we were in battle—even though she was ferocious with a blade in her hands.