Josephine's voice kills any man who hears it-except for the assassin sent to capture her for the king that's been chasing her all her life...but what happens when he decides he doesn't want to hand her over and keep her for himself instead?
...
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"Your mother is the Goddess of beauty, and yet you turn into a beast every nightfall. I wonder what she must think about that."
"I'd assume she'd be rather pleased. She is the one who placed the curse on me nineteen years ago after all."
I recoiled from Oren's indifferent tone. He didn't have a care in the world about what his mother had done to him so long ago?
"Why?"
His gaze would not meet mine.
"Why would she place that kind of a curse on you, Oren? Why would a mother ever—"
"Because she is not a mother. She is a Goddess, Josephine, and she can do whatever she pleases. I can do nothing to stop her with my powers barely out of their infancy. I was only a five year old boy when this curse was placed upon me, and I'll do anything to have it removed."
Chills ran swiftly down my spine at the reverence in his tone.
"Why did she do this to you?"
Still, Oren would not give me an answer to my question.
"Oren?"
His mouth stayed locked tight as the gates of Hefeta.
Where once my gaze begged me to trace the soft swell of his lips or the sharp outline of his chiseled jaw, my mind suddenly urged me to slide away from the heated expanse of Oren's body, but just as I made the move to put some distance between us, Oren caught my hand in his.
"No, wait. I'm sorry, I just—no one has ever really cared to ask why she has done this to me. Adira has many children all over the world, and each one of them is cursed to transform under the light of the moon. I'm just the only one who's ever tried to do anything about it."
"Why would she curse all of her children to turn into beasts every night?"
My tone must've softened something inside of him, because as the surmounting energy that had once flickered and drummed against my back urging me to grow closer to him, that same energy left me in one absolute swift move, as if he had reached into every orifice in my mind and expunged every trace of his strange power from it.
"It's all about the balance of power. With children so irresistible, there had to be some drawbacks, right? But, Josephine," he began, crushing his hands around me to pull me in even closer.
The wind stirred, as if only just noticing our presence when before all had been still as death.
Strands of my hair brushed across the light shadowing of dark stubble on Oren's face from the wind that was scented with cloying apple and tangy bark of the Briar trees in Avanth.
"The Sirens here in Hefeta offered to help me break the curse. All to find you and bring you here. I am sorry for what I did to you. I should've handled the situation better than I did, I just couldn't fathom the thought of surviving an immortal life transforming into something I'm not until the end of my existence. It wouldn't have been a life at all. I was desperate, but what I did to you was wrong. I hope you accept my apology."
