Filed To Story: Cursed Legacies Series Free PDF by Morgan B Lee
And if Crypt beat me to her, Sachar had better assign that asshole some kind of punishment for leaving me alone like this, after all the shit we went through together.
As if the cruel gods decided this really is my time to go, I hear grunting and heavy footfalls before a massive figure appears standing above me. A ghoul. They linger in areas like this to feast on the fresh dead. This one is covered in gore like it was doing just that.
When the shadow fiend’s attention drifts down to me and it makes a hideous sound, I decide this is it. I’m too damn tired and tapped out to defend myself—and so what if a ghoul does me in? It’s all the same at this point.
I close my eyes and speak under my breath, willing these words to carry me to her quicker.
“I love you, too.”
So much that it’s killing me.
It’s what I should have said when she was in my arms. It’s what I’ll say to her over and over again in the Beyond as I beg for forgiveness for failing her in every way possible.
Just as the beast lifts a foot to crush me, a gleaming something arcs through the air.
The ghoul’s head rolls off its shoulders before the body collapses, thudding heavily onto the icy road right next to me. It twitches and goes still as a smaller figure emerges from the dimming whiteout. Black hair billowing in the wind. The perfect height. Probably beautiful, if I could see more clearly through the blizzard.
Look at that. The gods are allowing me to dream about her in my last moments.
The figure rounds the fallen ghoul to crouch beside me, and as soon as I get a better look at her face?—
No.
This isn’t real.
She’s not real.
But this face is too fucking perfect to be drummed up by my memory.
Dark, beautiful eyes filled with the fury of hell itself. Olive skin. That perfect curve in her lower lip. A slight redness to her nose and cheeks from the cold. Ghoul blood dripping from the scythe in her hand. Even Baelfire’s bite scar on the side of her neck when the wind blows her hair aside again.
“Were you going to defend yourself?” my hallucination demands.
And I know she has to be a hallucination. There’s no other explanation, but I can’t stop staring. I’m too stunned by the sound of the voice that’s been haunting me for months. It’s dripping with protective warning like she’s livid that I was ready to give up.
“Everett,” I vaguely hear her prompt.
I trace every feature with my gaze. This delicate, understated beauty, contrasted with her powerful presence, is a drug I can’t give up.
My hallucination’s attention settles on the left side of my face, and she reaches out to brush the haggard scar with her fingertips.
Her very real, very warm fingertips.
My heart skips several beats, my entire body reacting like I was just struck by lightning. She touched me. I know that touch. I’ve ached for it so long that I can’t breathe through a sudden wave of confusion and sharp fear.
This can’t be real. It can’t be. Because if it’s real and she’s touching me?—
“Maven?” I whisper, my reality twisting in on itself as I realize hallucinations don’t have warm fingers.
Fingers that are quickly turning pink and purple from frostbite.
Oh, gods.
Fuck. She’s real. She’s real, and she touched me, and now she’s going to pay the price.
Pure horror floods my system, choking me. Darkness has coagulated around us, chilling whispers and laughter dancing in the howling wind as I watch my keeper begin to freeze, ice crackling up her arm and neck. Her eyes widen, a scream lodges in her frozen throat, and?—
An inhuman screech cuts through the air beside us so violently that it startles me. As soon as it cuts off, the scene in front of me ripples and changes. Maven is crouching beside me exactly how she was, only now her attention is on the wraith beside us…which was just cut in half by her scythe. Both pieces of the shadow fiend drop to the ground, shrieking and hissing before evaporating.
I’m left trembling, shaken to my damn core as I realize the wraith just made its move, using my newfound fear against me—and she killed it.
Because she’s here. Real.
Maven looks back at me. The scythe in her hand shrinks instantly, now a clear knife that she tucks away without an explanation. She’s just crouching here, all…
alive.
When my breathing turns quick and labored, her gaze slips down to my bloodied side. She moves the torn trench coat aside and immediately moves to put pressure on the wound, but I panic.
“Don’t,” I warn hoarsely, propping up on one arm to scoot away as my head spins.
She can’t touch me again. It’s not safe for her.
Maven’s dark eyes lock onto mine. “I understand if you hate me.”
Wait…
what?
Hate her? What the hell is she talking about?
“It doesn’t change the fact that you’re mine,” my keeper clarifies firmly, reaching up to brush snowflakes out of my hair before I can protest.
She removes her coat, tears a strip out of it, and takes advantage of the fact that I’m propped up to start wrapping my bleeding midsection.
“I did try to prevent this,” she goes on, not even flinching at the cold emanating from me. “If you four had just accepted my rejection at the beginning, you would have had a different keeper, and none of this would have happened. Unfortunately for you, that was your one chance out. Now, I’d sooner raise myself from the dead than let you go.”
I still can’t move, but a sound somewhere between agony and relief escapes me by accident when her fingertips glide gently over the scar on my face again.
An unbearably tender sensation follows everywhere she touches. It’s like being infused with pure peace.
And gods, this warmth. I haven’t felt anything like it since she stopped breathing in my arms.
Just the reminder of that moment when everything shattered has my reality again rearranging itself. Between the exhaustion, pain, and shock, I can’t get a grip.
“Prove this is real,” I demand raggedly, closing my eyes when her fingers trace the scar down my neck to where it dips below my clothes. “Say it again.”
If she’s real, I need her to ruin me again.
Maven knows exactly what I’m talking about. She considers for a moment before her free hand slips into my hair. She tugs my head back gently to make me look at her again, but it’s just enough that my heart skips another beat.
“I love you,” she admits quietly, still endearingly reticent about those words. Then her eyes narrow in steely warning.
“Which is why you’re about to promise me that you will never again sit on your ass doing nothing when you’re in danger.”
It’s her. She’s back.
“I promise,” I manage.
And finally her lips are on mine, so heated and perfect that two things happen. My long-neglected cock twitches, and my fragmented heart starts to pound. This moment is beyond surreal. I think I’ll wake up any second, but when she continues to kiss me, something savagely dark and incurable cements itself deep inside my bones.
Maven thinks I regret being bound to her? How fucking asinine. She should be a million times more worried about who exactly she just confessed to loving, because I am not the same match she knew.
New Book: Returned To Make Them Pay
On her wedding anniversary, Alicia is drugged and stumbles into the wrong room—straight into the arms of the powerful Caden Ward, a man rumored never to touch women. Their night of passion shocks even him, especially when he discovers she’s still a virgin after two years of marriage to Joshua Yates.