Bellamaledicta

The blood was warmer than Alice remembered.

And definitely more metallic.

But on the night her parents were slaughtered like mere livestock, Alice was barely eight years old. Her parents had hidden her in the storage room under the house, her little hands pressed over her mouth to stifle her cries. If the creature heard her, it didn’t care and simply left. By the time Alice crawled out of her hiding place, the blood spattered across the floor was almost cold beneath her bare feet.

Now it runs down her chin, hot and throbbing like her racing heart. She wipes it from her split lip with the back of her hand without taking her eyes off her opponent.

Akkaris circles her like a predator hunting its prey, his massive body creating shadows dancing on the ground and momentarily blocking the faces that watch with giddy smiles and exited eyes. Just a pair of black ones watch in silence, with razor sharp attention.

“Eyes on me, little mouse.” Akkaris chuckles low. “Or are you ready to surrender?”

“More ready to defeat you, big guy.”

“Let´s see, shall we?”

Akkaris lunges.

Even with his size, he’s fast. Alice barely has time to breathe before his shoulder slams into her ribs, driving the air from her lungs in a sharp, useless gasp. She stumbles back, boots scraping against dirt slick with old blood and sweat, but she compels her legs to keep her from falling, her face from showing any kind of weakness.

She pivots instead—small, quick, a shadow slipping beneath his reach.

Pain shoots across her side. Her dagger flashes.

Steel manages to bite into Akkaris’ forearm. Not deep. Just enough to draw a long line of scarlet over his thick, dark skin. He roars, more amused than hurt.

Just a second. Her eyes flash to assess the expression on those dark ones, watching her from outside the chalk circle. A second where they remain unreadable.

Then—

Her head snaps sideways as Akkaris backhands her across the jaw. Something pops. Light explodes behind her eyes.

Blood floods her mouth.

Hot. Thick. Metallic.

Her pulse stutters.

For a heartbeat—just one—everything sharpens.

She’s on the ground. Dirt pulsing under her like the raw skin in her cheek. The roar of the crowd dulls. Akkaris’s breathing becomes a slow, thunderous rhythm she can almost predict. She tastes not just iron, but something else beneath it. Something sweet that hums. And answers.

Alice’s fingers curl tighter around her fallen blade. Her legs stop trembling. The ache in her ribs dulls to a distant throb, like it’s happening to someone else.

Akkaris narrows his eyes. “What’s that look?” he mutters. “Was I too hard on you?”

She kneels tauntingly and spits blood at his feet, an unwavering smirk curving her tinted lips.

His brow twitches. A fraction of an instant, but definitely there.

He charges, ready to use his leg to crush her, but Alice moves. She dodges to the right and ducks low, using her size the way it was drilled into her bones—be where they aren’t looking.

She slides under Akkaris’s next swing, rolls, comes up behind him. Her dagger skims across his left calf, then again on the right, shallow but precise, opening skin.

This time, his blood spills.

It splashes warm against her knuckles.

Her breath catches.

The reaction is instant—violent. Her vision blurs, then refocuses, edges glowing faintly, as if the world has leaned closer, threatening to crush her.

Alice twists aside just in time, feeling the wind of his fist pass where her skull had been a second earlier. She drives her shoulder into his knee. He stumbles. Just enough.

She leaps.

Her dagger plunges beneath his collarbone, angling up—not a killing blow, but close enough to make the crowd gasp.

Akkaris bellows and shoves her away.

Alice hits the ground hard, the breath squeezed from her lungs. Stars burst across her vision. The heat inside her flares—and then flickers.

Too much.

Her limbs go heavy. The pulse under her skin stutters again, uncertain, like it doesn’t belong to her yet.

Akkaris advances, limping now, rage burning through his grin.

“I’m done with you,” he snarls. “Let’s get this over with.”

Her body is failing her. She’s almost out of time.

Her mind starts to panic—

Don’t.

The word snaps, sharp and familiar.

You panic; you die.

The dirt beneath her palms becomes hard-packed stone. A training ring. Cold mornings. Bruises she wasn’t allowed to complain about.

You’re smaller, Captain Illion’s voice says in her head, calm and merciless.

So, stop trying to be stronger.

A blur of memory—Rowan circling her, arms crossed.

Let them swing.

Let them miss.

Big men fall hard when they lose their balance.

A loud grunt slams the presents back into her lungs.

Akkaris charges.

Alice pushes her body to roll at the last second, hooking her foot behind his ankle instead of trying to stop his weight. She twists, uses his momentum against him.

Akkaris roars in surprise as equilibrium betrays him.

He crashes backwards into the dirt with a bone-rattling thud.

Alice is on him in an instant.

Fury surges—hot, reckless, intoxicating. Her dagger rises, shaking in her grip.

Kill him.

End it.

“Enough!”

The command explodes across the ring.

Silence slams down.

But her knife whistles through the air.

It buries itself in the dirt beside Akkaris’s throat.

The giant freezes, shock blooming across his face before the crowd erupts.

She lifts her eyes.

Rowan Illion stands just beyond the ring of burning torches, arms crossed, face carved from stone and shadow. His dark eyes are locked on her—not on the soldier at her feet, not on the cheering men—but on the blood streaking her chin, her trembling hands, the way she’s fighting gravity itself.

For a moment, he doesn’t move.

Then Alice’s knees buckle.

She catches herself on sheer will alone, teeth clenched hard enough to hurt. She will not fall. Not here. Not in front of—

Her vision blacks out at the edges.

The world tilts.

Suddenly, Rowan is there.

His hands grip her shoulders, firm and unyielding. “Enough,” he says quietly, the word a command meant only for her. “That’s an order.”

Alice only nods as her captain turns to the excited soldiers.

“Quiet!” Rowan shouts, the command slicing through cheers and laughter. “Everyone to your posts. Now!”

The crowd dissolves at once, men peeling away in grumbling clusters. Akkaris’s face blurs in Alice’s vision—she catches the glare he throws her before he turns and disappears among the others.

“Can you walk?” Rowan asks, his voice low.

“I’m fine,” Alice breathes, even as the ground sways beneath her feet.

She grips his vambrace, stealing the steadiness he offers, fighting the urge to collapse into his arms. A crooked smile pulls at her mouth.

“Never—” Her jaw tightens. “…better.”

“I’ll take that as a no,” he replies, something dangerous slipping beneath his calm.

He doesn’t wait for permission.

Rowan scoops her up, ignoring the stares, the murmurs, and Alice’s weak attempts to make him put her down. Nausea coils at the base of her throat as she tries to kick free. Her head lolls briefly against his shoulder before she snaps herself awake again.

“Don’t,” she mutters. “Don’t let me—”

“I’ve got you,” Rowan says, low and fierce, carrying her toward his tent. “You’re not dying on my watch.”

Inside the dim shelter, he lowers her onto a cot. Alice grips his collar weakly, her fingers burning against the fur, her pulse still humming with something that isn’t finished with her yet.

Rowan watches her too closely.

“You’re fine,” he murmurs near her ear.

His breath brushes her cheek, sending a chill down her molting spine.

She frees herself from his grasp, breathing in and out the way he taught her all those years ago—back when it first started happening. Her gaze stays fixed on the floor, though she can feel him standing there, a dark shape at the edge of her blurred vision.

Until he isn’t.

She lifts her head just as he digs into his pouch.

“You know you’re the reason they think I’m weak,” she says quietly. “You care for me too much.”

“If you stopped collapsing so often,” Rowan says dryly, “I wouldn’t care this much.”

He walks back and presses a vial into her hand. “Drink this.”

The vial glows star-like under the torches’ fire. It’s the size of her index finger. Barely half full. Mockingly sweet-looking.

Alice hesitates. For a heartbeat, she’d rather suffer than taste that thing on her tongue again. Her head shrieks in protest anyway, so she tips the vial back and swallows the cursed blue liquid, nearly gagging as it burns its way down.

“You’re pushing too far,” Rowan says, taking the empty vial from her fingers.

“If I don’t,” she replies hoarsely with aftertaste, “I die. Isn’t that what you’ve always said?”

“In battle,” he corrects, turning away to retrieve a damp cloth. He kneels in front of her again, movements sharp with restraint. “Here, you’re just trying to prove a point.”

“And that point is?”

“That you’re just as strong as they are.”

“I am,” she blinks hard, pushing the pain back.

“Not yet.”

He wipes the blood from her chin, careful in the way only a soldier pretending not to care can be. “In their eyes, you’re still a child—”

“And in yours?”

His breath stills.

Rowan’s gaze crashes into hers.

He doesn’t move.

He’s there—too close. His hand hovers near her chin, near her jaw, close enough that she can see herself reflected in his pooling-ink irises. Close enough to breathe him in: leather, iron, the faint bite of night air clinging to his hair.

Something pulses from within him.

Not imagined. Not hers alone.

It hums low, steady, like a heartbeat she isn’t meant to hear.

For a dangerous second, the world narrows to the space between them. Her lungs fill with him. Her pulse answers his. The air feels charged, stretched thin enough to tear.

Then It’s gone.

The medicine finally takes hold.

The heat beneath her skin cools. The strange awareness drains away, leaving her hollowed and painfully herself again. The pulsing fades, retreating somewhere she can no longer reach.

Rowan’s hand drops.

His expression shutters, snapping closed like a door slammed from the inside. Whatever had flickered in his eyes vanishes, replaced by the unreadable calm she knows too well.

Captain Illion again.

The moment dissolves so completely it feels unreal—like something she dreamed and woke from too late to hold onto.

Rowan straightens.

Alice swallows. The distance returns all at once, deliberate and practiced.

As if it had never existed at all.

The captain’s mask settles perfectly into place, seamless enough that Alice almost doubts what she felt moments ago.

“Sleep,” he says, already turning away. “Training starts at sunrise.”

She doesn’t answer. His back is to her, the weight of the spaulders settled onto his shoulders like a vow he could never remove.

He reaches the entrance of the tent, pauses just long enough that hope stirs—dangerous, unwanted.

“Don’t be late.”

The canvas shifts as he steps outside.

Then he’s gone.

Alice lies back against the cot, the echo of his presence still clinging to her skin, her blood quiet now, obedient.

Too obedient.

She stares at the tent ceiling long after the sounds of the camp fade, wondering which is worse—

The warm feeling in her belly that threatens to burn her from the inside, or the medicine to claw its way back into the outside.