Chapter Three
The whiteness lingers, like a curtain drawn over the world, and then it begins to fade.
Slowly, agonizingly, I open my eyes and face the tree’s canopy.
I’ve somehow ended on my back, on top of the cold, fractured stone.
My chest throbs, the pain sharp and intense, as if I had been the one shot.
My hand flies to the spot, and heat sears beneath my fingers.
Sitting up, I see him, the Cursed One, who is also shaking himself awake.
My breath catches in my throat. The arrow that pierced him and should have killed him lies harmlessly a few inches away. He should be dead, or at least badly wounded. But there is no gash. Still no blood. Nothing.
Except for gold.
Veins of golden light radiate outward from the exact center of his chest, right where the arrow had struck. They pulse faintly, rhythmically, alive with a warmth that seems to beat in time with my own heart.
My fingers tug at my tunic, and when I peek down, I see the same glowing pattern imprinted between my breasts.
Terror spikes. What—
A flood of unknown sensations race through me, and I clutch my chest, shuffling away. There’s a loud booming in my ears, out of sync with my pulse, and a deep voice whispering across my mind. But it doesn’t belong to me.
The Cursed One jolts upright and our gazes lock. In that instant, understanding snaps into place. These foreign sensations, these rustling thoughts, they’re his.
I can feel him. Every beat of his heart, every flicker of thought, every restrained surge of emotion bleeds into my own. The intimacy of it turns my stomach, and panic coils.
“What-what’s happening?” I choke out as I scramble to my feet. I try to control it but I can’t. My training is out of reach, seemingly lost to the darkness. Only he remains.
Lust licks at me within. Pain throbs, and I’m contracting and expanding.
I force the thoughts and sensations away as much as I can.
None of this makes sense. He should be dead. I saw my arrow strike him with my own two eyes. I saw it.
His frayed wings stretch in a deliberate, languid motion, as though testing the air, the gravity, the world itself.
But like me, there is confusion on his face.
Or…is it that I can feel his confusion deep within me, like a vibration against my soul?
Like me, he takes in the gold glowing on his chest before looking up at me again.
“W-what…” I begin.
“It’s…you feel it too?” he asks. Like before, his voice is deep and almost hypnotic.
But instead of answering his question, I blurt out, “You should be dead.”
His eyes flash. “It takes more than a mere arrow to kill me, human.”
I’m still breathing hard, and I wobble on my feet as my body struggles to get used to the storm of new feelings.
My chest still burns, the bond screaming, the golden patterns throbbing in tandem. “What’s happened?” I gasp. “What—what are these gold patterns? Why are they on me?”
“I think…” He hesitates. “I think we’ve been…bound. Somehow. You and me.”
I stagger back a step, a chill running through me. “Bound? What does that mean?”
He watches me, and his expression softens. “It means you touched what you should have not and you set off something.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like fate.”
The word makes me reel. “I don’t… How?”
“It means, little human, that fate had other plans for us.”
“No…” The thought nearly suffocates me, curling around my ribs like iron bands. Not knowing what else to do, I search the ground for my dagger, and when I find it not even a foot away, I seize it and point it at him. “I can’t be bound to—this is one of your tricks!”
“A creature may only be soul-bound to a human if their spirits were once one, two lives drawn from the same cosmic tapestry at the dawn of creation,” he says, eyeing my blade.
“Once one?”
“You ask a lot of questions.” He nods and a small smile appears. “But yes, it seems we were meant to find each other.”
He takes a step toward me, but I shift back. His casual demeanor irks me even more, especially when I can feel his hum of acceptance inside me. Then he does something even more unexpected. He lifts both hands in surrender.
“I don’t want to kill you,” he mutters. It’s the second time he’s said the lie to me.
“That makes one of us,” I snap.
“It wouldn’t be wise for you to do that. Especially now.”
Annoyance pricks. “And why not?”
“Because you would be killing yourself as well.”
“You lie.”
“Am I? You shot me and yet you felt it, didn’t you?” he says.
“Not straight away.”
“Fate plays games but always hits true. Fate waited until you touched me.” He gazes at me. “Fate sent you to me.”
I pause, then straighten. I want to say he’s lying again, but inside me, I can feel the steadiness of his heartbeat, the certainty. This is all so confusing. So overwhelming that the next time he takes a step toward me, I don’t move away.
“No…”
“Yes…if one of us dies, the other dies too.” He runs a hand over the glowing pattern on his chest. The light seems to react to his touch, pulsing faster, brighter. “I’ve only heard stories, but I’m sure that is what this is. Why else can I feel you woven through every fiber of my being?”
“You…you can feel me?” I ask.
He leans forward. “I can feel you. Every pulse, every heartbeat, every thought, every trembling breath. Everything.”
“I still don’t understand. What can we do to reverse it?”
“Reverse?” he laughs. “I can try to explain… I was never meant to touch humans, and they weren’t ever meant to touch me. I was created as an angel—specifically a Cupid—to spread love to the mortal world—”
“I know this,” I snap. “I know the legend of the Cursed One.”
He scoffs. “The Cursed One. Did your Elders ever tell you how I came to be cursed? Why I was cast out of the heavens and lost my wings?”
At the mention of them, his broken and charred wings twitch at his back.
In my silence, he continues. “Of course not.” His gaze lifts skyward and his brows crease. His sorrow and anger flow into me suddenly. “As a Cupid, I was forbidden to interact with humans directly. Centuries ago, I broke that rule. I fell in love. With a mortal woman.”
I stare at him in disbelief. “You…fell in love?”
“And that’s so hard to believe?” he asks, mocking.
I push out words. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Or perhaps it’s a lie.”
“It’s not,” he says.
“Right…” I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “So you fell in love?”
“I did. I loved her with everything I am… But our love was forbidden. It didn’t stop me from asking the gods to let me be with her, to make an exception to their rules.
They were furious—” More hot anger lashes at my insides, and the Cursed One grinds his teeth.
“The gods punished me. They killed her. And for centuries, I’ve been cursed, forced to collect the soul of a woman each year to keep my wings—what’s left of them—and my soul away from total damnation. ”
The ruins around us seem to echo with his words, to amplify them.
Again, I want to lash out and say it’s all a lie, but the emotions flooding me keep my mouth clamped shut.
My fear and confusion warps with something else.
Tenderness. Empathy. Longing. But my chest still burns; the bond sears, telling me all that he says is the furthest from it.
It can’t be.
“You still don’t believe me,” he says, reading my thoughts.
“Keep out of my head!” I bite out. “It’s unnerving. All of this is.”
“I know you’re trying to rationalize what is happening, but…” He glances around and picks up a piece of stone that’s about the size of his palm and jagged around the edges. “Maybe this will be enough to convince you.”
He pushes the tip of the rock into his palm. Pain instantly flares to life in my hand, and I gasp, holding it up to my face. My skin splits before my eyes and blood bubbles up.
“Stop it!” I bark.
Holding up his hand, he shows the identical cut across his palm and the gold blood leaking down his wrist. “Do you believe me now?”