21. Elhyor
21
Elhyor
E verything is silent.
Everything is too silent.
Until I feel the air shift at my back, and I turn just in time to see Angélique jump from the railing onto me.
It’s only when I feel the searing pain in my chest that I realize that she jumped with two daggers in hands and that each is protruding from my pecs.
What the fuck just happened?
They’re not embedded too deep, since I caught Angélique with both hands as she fell over me, but it still hurts like hell.
Also… I’m feeling this weird mix of anger and pride that I don’t want to look too closely at.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
Everything feels so surreal that I don’t realize I haven’t moved until Angélique wiggles in my grasp, pushing the daggers inside my flesh in the process.
I lift Angélique from me, getting her arms as far away as I can with the daggers still stuck inside my chest.
It’s not as easy as it sounds.
The Little Devil keeps kicking in my direction and wiggling, as if she knows exactly how to get out of my grasp.
It probably would work if I weren’t so tall next to her and wasn’t holding her thirty centimeters above the ground.
“You!”
It’s the only word that breaks free.
”Let me down!” she answers with snark.
I switch to holding her with just one hand under her armpit, and I curse when she almost gets away.
Then she pulls on the hand holding her with all her might, and I feel her nails dig under my skin, but I hold tight.
With one hand, I grab the handle of the dagger embedded in my chest closest to her, and before I pull it free, I see her eyes shine with hope.
I smirk at her as I tug on the handle; a wet sound and a red trail following the removal of the dagger from my body.
“Sorry, Little Devil. I’d hate to disappoint you, but I heal too fast to bleed to death.”
I take a few steps until she’s pinned to the wall. There’s a cross just behind her, and I know I should be ashamed about what I’m about to do, especially since we’re in a church, and it’s part of the belief of the men and women who come to pray here every Sunday morning, but I don’t hesitate.
By the time the blade is stuck into the wood, right through the palm of her hand, the blood from my chest has stopped running out and her eyes are wide with disbelief.
I expected a scream, or at least a flinch, but no, disbelief is the only thing I can see.
“I can’t be killed,” I say as I place my free hand at her throat. I’m not squeezing, just holding her in a way that shows that I could.
The truth is, I can be killed. With a blade to my heart, or maybe by being burned. But I’ve never known of any fire hot enough to burn through dragon skin. There probably are other ways, but they haven’t been documented, and dragons just heal a lot faster than any other shifters. All of these things make people think we can’t be killed. It also helps that our heart is not on the left side of our ribcage, it’s full center, and I don’t think anyone has ever revealed that.
It’s a good thing, because the Little Devil’s daggers didn’t plunge deep enough to get through the other side of my body, but they were deep enough to have hit my heart if it had been where everyone else has theirs.
As it is, Angélique not so sweetly framed my heart with steel.
“Can’t be true.” She spits the words at my face like they’re venom.
She’s so far from the vixen who moaned in the room next door all week, and even more from the doll I thought she looked like when she arrived.
And she’s so far from breakable.
I still should send her back to her father.
Wait.
This attack is even more of a reason to send her back to her father.
“What? Disappointed you couldn’t kill me?”
She looks me straight in the eyes.
“Yes.”
Her voice doesn’t waver.
I remove the hand that is under her armpit, and she’s now balancing between the dagger through the palm of her hand and my hand around her throat.
She tries to turn herself to grab the handle of the dagger, but my body is wedged in between, and she’s too far to reach it.
I withdraw the second blade from my chest, and I see the resolve in her eyes as I twirl it and bring it to her other hand.
She doesn’t flinch. She looks me directly in the eyes, as if she doesn’t want to show how much pain she’s in.
She’s so prepared for the blade to go through her skin again that she’s shocked when, instead, I plunge the blade into the wood and force her to grab it.
“I’m sending you back, and that’s final,” I say, fire in my eyes.
And I leave her there on her cross without a second look.