Daggermouth

by H.M. Wolfe

Sure, he was objectively attractive, if you liked the tall, brooding, homicidal type. Which she didn’t. Obviously.

“Beautiful things are often built on ugly foundations.”

Lira hesitated. Time alone with Callum was dangerous—like handling exposed wires with wet hands. Every interaction held the potential for shock, for burn from that current that had never quite stopped flowing between them despite her best efforts to sever the connection.

“Afraid of getting too close, my love?” The old nickname stung more than it should have. My love. What he used to whisper against her ear in those stolen moments before he crushed any chance for them beneath his heel.

She never lost control like this. Never let her emotions dictate her words. But Callum had always been the exception, the fault line, the one who slipped past her barricades and unsettled the most guarded corners of her heart. The one that always found the parts of herself she kept hidden from everyone else.

But his body betrayed him, attuned to her presence like a tuning fork to its perfect pitch.

A matched set of nightmares, ready for their public debut.

“Just thinking that maybe we’re both prisoners here, in different ways.”

he was becoming a person to her. Complex, contradictory, trapped in his own way.

Every preconceived notion she had about Greyson had been challenged today. Not erased—he was still the Executioner, still the enemy. But beneath that identity, he was also a boy caught in a web. A man created by an evil system whose soul, at the very least, suffered for the pain he’d caused. Evil could sometimes come in the form of beauty.

The contrast between the delicate dress and those battle-worn boots should’ve been jarring, but somehow it worked—a visual representation of the contradiction that she was.

The dress didn’t just reveal flesh, but history—pain and survival written in scar tissue and ink. It was beautiful in its brutality, an honest reflection of their world that could not be erased even if the Heart tried.

She was everything he was never allowed to be—wild and untamed chaos.

The statement from her lips was a blade sliding between his ribs, finding the heart of a truth he rarely acknowledged even to himself.

Shadera strode away from him without a word toward her room and as he watched her go, as those auburn curls swayed with every step she took, he realized the irony of it all. The woman sent to kill him, was the only woman who had ever made him feel safe.

She wouldn’t do it, not anymore. Something shifted inside her chest, a tectonic movement of emotion that had been building for years. The fear that had been her constant companion since childhood receded, replaced by something hotter, something with teeth. Rage.

“Be careful. The Heart is changing. Becoming more unpredictable.” “Dying beasts often are,” he replied, then slipped past her out of the room.

“Jameson fucking Vine. I believe your hands are on my wife.”

“If you even think about it, I will kill you.” Greyson grinned, the expression feral and hungry. “Then I’m already a dead man.”

His eyes met Lira’s across the room, and in that moment, he made a silent vow to destroy the entire rotting edifice of the Heart’s government. To tear it down stone by stone until nothing remained of Maximus Serel’s legacy but ashes.

“Is that a threat, Ms. Kael?” he asked, his voice silk over poison. “It’s a promise,” she replied. “The Heart will fall. You will fall. And I will be there to watch it happen.”

“Women are the backbone, the foundation, the immovable force that still does not falter when men stand on our spines to grab power.

The cracks in my soul aren’t broken places. They are veins cemented together with rage. And it will take more than the hands of men to kill my spirit, to break my will.”

Today, Maximus Serel and his golden mask would fall.

He simply held her, solid and present, an anchor in the storm of her despair.

Her body was a battlefield, a record of survival written in scar tissue and damaged flesh.

This was Shadera—the real Shadera, stripped of masks and defenses, of bravado and pride. This was the woman who’d survived horrors he could only imagine, who’d been shaped by pain as he’d been, forged in the same cruel fire that had tempered his own soul. They were mirror images, he realized. Both weapons crafted by others’ hands, both scarred by the roles they’d been forced to play. Both longing for something they could barely name—freedom, perhaps. Redemption. A chance to be more than what violence had made them.

For a few precious minutes, there was no Vow ceremony, no Heart, no Boundary. Just two broken people finding a moment of peace in the midst of chaos.

“It’s over, Father,” Greyson said. “Your Heart is broken.”

“Men never truly understand the meaning of patience. You see, men like you can’t comprehend even the concept of suffering, the lesson to be learned in it. Especially not in silence.” Her eyes never left his. “But women? That is all we do. We endure. We wait. We survive.”