This time, I knew what I was doing. And how to do it.
Circling the bed to get on Dahr’s side, I waited until the opportune moment when his hands relaxed enough to spread out and away from his chest, leaving his beating heart exposed under a set of ribs I knew how to penetrate through.
It couldn’t be more difficult than piercing through marble, could it? All I needed was a sharp angle and strength. One push of that dagger into his chest and it would stop… everything.
It would stop the attack.
It would stop the drake camp from advancing.
And it would stop my heart along with his.
No, Nora. You have to do it. Do not let your feelings get in the way. This man is tricking you and you are falling for him once more. It can’t happen again.
Knowing that it was now or never, I forced a tight grip on the dagger and practised the angle of penetration, just like they taught us year after year at university. Determination was key.
So I launched myself on him.
I wouldn’t be able to do it from this angle, the dagger would remain stuck in his ribs, that much I knew. I needed him to lay flat on his back and I needed to be on top of him so I could push the blade straight into his chest.
One moment I was towering over Dahr and the next, I was jumping on top of him, keeping his midsection trapped under the weight of my hips, which pushed into his own to hold him in place.
I knew he would react in a heartbeat and that was exactly the amount of time I had left. Gripping the dagger with all the strength I had in me, I pushed into his chest.
Dahr’s eyes shot open, his sharp gasp tensing his pecs and tightening his chest muscles. My hand started shaking at the sight of him, at the betrayal shining in his eyes, at his saddened expression.
But I kept pushing.
Tears blocked most of my view as I kept forcing the dagger into skin and bone, pushing into it with everything I was and everything I had become. Whilst utterly hating myself for doing it.
Something hard stopped the blade from hitting deeper and I blinked tears away to find the dagger embedded in Dahr’s thorax, my hand shaking around the hilt.
“That’s not the way to the heart, little flame,” Dahr rasped, his voice too shook by the impact to gain its full strength. Or maybe that was how pained breaths sounded.
I wanted to die.
I wanted to disappear, I wanted to take it back, I wanted to turn back time and slap myself for this idiotic decision.
I couldn’t kill anyone. Especially not…
“What is the way to the heart, then?” I sobbed as rivers of tears kept pouring down my cheeks and into my neck. I watched how a line of blood painted the blade crimson from where it remained stuck into bone. My entire body shook at the sight, my muscles quivered, and breath stopped in my lungs.
Dahr moved slowly to remove my trembling fingers from where I was still connected to the dagger and shifted them two inches to the side, to the very centre of his chest.
“Here,” he said as he tapped my fingernails against the hard surface. My palm spread out over the surface to feel the beats of his heart, which pounded desperately against his chest as more blood gushed from the wound I had speared into him.
“You need to do it again,” Dahr said softly, and I looked up at him to find a sea of calmness in those night-sky dark eyes. This man was teaching me how to kill him while he was looking at me as if I was his whole entire world. “Try coming at a thirty-degree angle, it gives you a better chance at avoiding the bone,” he explained as calmly as one would talk about making an omelette.
“Aren’t you scared?” my voice shook as I continued crying.
Crying for him.
For me.
For what I was doing to him.
“Not with you, little flame,” Dahr smiled at me. SMILED!
A man on the brink of death smiling encouragingly and teaching me how to kill him better.
