❝ Pain was my fuel, until the fire began bleeding from my veins. ❞
The girl without a name.
The black-haired fiend devoid of fear.
The sharp-tongued scoundrel always ready with a trick up her sleeve.
Thief and street rat Azura knows how to hustle a...
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• Stunning cover designed by -wanderes and banner made by me but inspired by her work •
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He's still breathing.
The voice in my head scrapes against my senses, like a blade against rough brick. I discard the leather gloves, soaked with blood from the corpse now cooling in the muddy street of Warroll.
Look. He's alive.
I huff, frustrated with the continuous arguments of the voices. He's dead, the pooling blood and glassy sheen over his eyes is all the evidence I need of that fact.
But they just can't help making me distrust my own senses.
The black gloves look like dead animals in the mud, bloody carcasses that've been thoroughly abused, like the rest of us.
You shouldn't have turned back. He would have hurt you for your stupidity.
The demanding voice doesn't like to be ignored, the grating tone of it raking down my spine.
Stop it. She needs to focus.
I clench my hands into fists and let out a breath, focusing on the tickle of the breeze against my knuckles, something that shouldn't be such a foreign feeling. I glance down at my clenched fist, my right hand etched with the golden markings that have haunted me all my life. No, bare hands shouldn't be strange, but I continue to try and pretend to be ordinary by hiding them behind gloves.
Ordinary? No killer is ordinary.
"Az?"
I blink at the whisper, almost convinced that it's another noise in my head. "Are you hurt?" I question, my voice abrupt in the silence of the alley, the aged brick throwing the words back at me.
Look what you've done. Look at it.
"You killed him," the boy says.
I tear my gaze away from the gloves and turn to Dax, those wide hazel eyes and quivering lower lip softening my gaze. I should treat him with the same cold indifference as everyone else, but Dax is... Well, it's Dax. I've spent too many sleepless nights fretting for the small boy, hoping his weaknesses won't kill him. I won't be here to save him every time.
They broke you. Broke you like they couldn't break him. Who's the weak one?
"He knew who you were, knew your connection with me," I murmur. "You would be dead if I hadn't turned back for you." I shove my offending hands into my pockets, wondering if they'll ever be clean again. I don't know why I bother wondering.
Ruined and bloody, like home. Like him.
What home?
"Keep going, Dax," I command as I shake myself enough to turn back towards the darkness of the alley.
