Sheer Cupidity: A Standalone Cupidity Romance (Heart Hassle Book 5)
Sheer Cupidity: Chapter 9

LEX

For all my skills, sense of direction isn’t one of them.

I’m very good at blowing the perfect amount of Lust Breath. I have a ninety-eight percent accuracy when letting loose a Love Arrow. I can make people want to get married with a single Flirt Touch. I’m also incredibly adept at knowing who’s most compatible together, and my organizational skills are unparalleled. I’m a fast reader, I have excellent penmanship, and I’ve never tested the theory, but I’m certain I could handle myself at a royal dinner, innately knowing which spoon to use.

But remembering directions? It’s like a foreign language. Harder even, since I’ve studied foreign languages, and I’ve easily mastered how to speak some simple phrases in troll. My weakness is in knowing where to go. I can be so sure something is one way, but be completely wrong.

I know where the battle island is in relation to the genfin island, but apparently that isn’t enough, because I end up seriously lost. I eventually have to go corporeal and touch down on some random place to ask for directions. Luckily, a haggard-looking tree fae manages to draw me a map in the dirt and set me back on track.

So it’s a day later than when I left Emelle’s, but when I finally spot the empty island, I almost wish I’d stayed lost.

I go corporeal, needing to take a steadying breath in order to face this. After stalling in the clouds for a minute, I make myself land, my eyes skimming over the dreary landscape. The entire island looks worn out and scarred, as if it too is still trying to recover from what happened here.

My shoes scrape against the dried-out ground, still charred in places from where it was set aflame after the battle. The buildings that were erected are gone, just like the king’s fields, torn away by the fae who wanted to erase what a corrupt monarchy had done.

Fog clings against the edges of the island, making everything seem so much more closed-in and isolated. Like nothing else exists in the whole realm except for this one place.

It’s eerie.

I shiver as I walk, my footsteps way too loud in the dense silence. I try to match up what I’m seeing now with what I saw then, but it’s different now with being so quiet and empty. Without the hundreds of bodies fighting against one another, it’s hard to blend the two as one, when all I really saw last time was fighting and death happening everywhere I looked.

Though as I walk further, I realize that death never left.

The graveyard I find isn’t fancy, but it isn’t decrepit either. With its simply-made headstones and stacked rock perimeter, it looks like it was hastily yet conscientiously made. I wonder if Emelle and her mates were here when it was created. I wonder if they helped. Just another thing to feel guilty for since I wasn’t here to lend a hand.

I force myself to walk through it, my eyes jumping from headstone to headstone, although I know Belren’s name isn’t on any of them. Emelle felt like he wouldn’t have wanted to be buried here, alone and tied to this place. So instead, she tracked down the island where he grew up. She had him buried in the prettiest cemetery she could find, with lots of flowers and trees, right smack dab in the middle of a town. There was even a pub next door, which Emelle said he would’ve liked.

I have to admit that when Sev told me that, it bothered me that Emelle seemed to know what he’d want. It bothered me because…shouldn’t I be the one to know things like that, when I was the reason he was dead? Shouldn’t I have put in some effort to know where he would’ve wanted to be laid to rest, since I essentially was the one to put him in the ground?

This is the one place I never could face, and now that I’m here, it’s no wonder. It’s a tomb of pulsing, painful memories.

I never told anyone this, but I searched for Belren. For a year, maybe longer. I looked in the afterlife processing center—abusing my cupid perks to get there. I searched other realms, searched every new cupid, angel, and demon, and the Minor entities too, always hoping against hope that I would see his face.

But I never found him.

I knew it was a long shot, that time is fickle. There’s no telling how long time passes from a life to an afterlife. It’s all fluid and different. Still, I searched.

Then, after an endless loop of frustrated defeat, I gave up. I couldn’t bear the repeated disappointment. I moped around the different realms, avoided my responsibilities, while also avoiding Emelle and Sev. I didn’t dare tell them that I’d been searching for him. I couldn’t bear to see the pity on their faces. For all we knew, it could take centuries for his spirit to show up, and even then, it would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

So I went from searching to avoiding to then making half-hearted attempts to do my job. From there, I made a real effort to buck up and pull myself together and get back to the way things were. To do that, I needed to stay busy and push myself even harder than before. I knew I had to forget about the horned fae and move on.

Except, I didn’t. I haven’t.

I shake my head at my thoughts, just as a breeze comes sweeping past me to whistle through the headstones. Did I say it was eerie before? Well, now, it’s downright creepy. A prickling sensation lifts the hairs on the back of my neck, making my eyes dart around.

In an instant, I pop back into the Veil, and I suck in a non-existent breath. There are ghosts everywhere. Of course there are. It’s pretty much par for the course when you’re in a graveyard. Some are genfins, some are high fae, all of them shadowed and see-through, eyes looking at nothing as they mutter and mope.

I can’t watch them for too long. Ghosts give me the creeps—which I know is hypocritical since, for all intents and purposes, I’m pretty ghostlike when I’m in the Veil.

“AHH!!!!”

I flinch at the female who screams bloody murder—probably accurate—and then just keeps floating along expressionlessly as she passes me by.

See? Creepy.

I turn around and leave the graveyard behind, but the skin-prickling sensation doesn’t relent. If anything, it just gets worse. I turn around to look, but the ghosts are still hanging around the graves, not paying me any mind.

I’m about to pop out of the Veil just so I don’t have to look at them anymore, but when I turn back around, something catches my eye.

No, that’s a lie. It’s not really my eye that catches on anything. It’s more of a sense. Something draws me, ghosts forgotten as I walk forward, almost trance-like.

This sixth sense has me stopping, and I look down at the ground, frowning in thought. And then, all at once, I just know.

It looks like any other spot on this island, except…this was where Belren’s body landed. This was where my knees buckled as I knelt over him. This was where I understood that saying “like a knife through the heart,” because as I looked at him, probably dead before he even hit the ground, that’s what it felt like.

A frown pulls down my mouth, and the skin between my brows creases. “I shouldn’t have come here,” I say to myself, because this isn’t any kind of closure at all. I’m not sure why I thought coming here would do anything to help or to let me move past the guilt, because this just makes me feel worse. “This is pointless.”

My head lifts, looking around the bleak island, and a deep-down anger starts to kick up.

“I shouldn’t be wandering around with a bunch of ghosts,” I tell the spot on the ground, as if Belren were still lying there and I could give him a piece of my mind. Maybe that’s what’s been behind the guilt—anger. Anger that he got himself killed and left me to live with it.

“I should be filing cupidity reports. Making Love Matches. Perfecting my short-range shot,” I say, a tic in my jaw pulsing with irritation. “I was fine before you went and died for me. Perfectly happy and busy and satisfied with my place and purpose. You know what this is, Belren-the-Horned-Hook? This is rude. You can’t just shove yourself in front of someone like that and mess up their whole afterlife!”

I pace around the ground, mouth pinched, heels digging into the wounded earth. “I was doing perfectly well before you shoved your life in front of mine, thank you very much. Maybe I didn’t want you to do that for me, did you ever think of that?” My voice is stronger now, nearly yelling, and I never yell.

After years of being confused and guilt-ridden, the anger comes pouring out in sharp shards, chipping away at my poised veneer like it’s chipped away at everything else.

“I just want to put all of this behind me for cupid’s sake. I want my easy, planned, organized, goal-oriented, empty existence back.” A sob chokes out of me, because even though I hadn’t meant to say it, it’s absolutely true. My life was empty before, but at least it didn’t hurt.

I sniff, like I can suck back in the emotion that slipped out. “I want to stop feeling so guilty all the darn time, so what do I have to do, huh?” I look around with my hands up, gaze directed at the sky in case the gods are listening. “What do I have to do to put him behind me?”

My loud words demand an answer, and my mind whirls to fulfill it, because enough is enough. I can’t keep going on like this. So what can I do to make this right…?

And just like that, an idea suddenly blares through me.

“That’s it,” I whisper, hand over my mouth.

It was silly to come here, I see that now. It’s not what I need to do at all.

I’ve always set personal challenges for myself to be the best, to work the hardest. But the new goal I have in mind has nothing to do with being a cupid and everything to do with a shot at true closure.

My lips press into a grim line. “I know what I have to do.”

It’ll be a personal goal that might be the hardest challenge I’ve ever set for myself, but maybe this is what I’m meant to do. Maybe the arrows hanging on my back are meant for more than just love.

There were reasons Belren was at that island in the first place, and one of them was to help Princess Soora and the rebellion. Princess Soora, who ended up betraying everyone, but with Belren, that deception was personal. If she hadn’t betrayed him, he might not have been there the moment the prince threw his power, and he’d still be alive.

I shove my shoulders back, this time pacing around with newfound ambition. “I have to kill Princess Soora,” I declare boldly. “She’s the one who lied to him, to everyone. His memory needs to be avenged, and I have to be the one to do it since it was my life he traded for his own.”

It settles inside me, solidifying into something scary but sure, like a gut feeling that I’m on the right track.

“I’ll just…find her. Get Belren some justice for her part in siding with the prince. Easy. One arrow through the heart should do it.” My head bobs. “Yes. That seems efficient. Just a simple, quick murder.”

Maybe Amorette’s violent tendencies rubbed off…

I wince but quickly cover it up. Now that I have a new goal set, I turn around, ready to start my search, only to stop cold at the sight of the ghost watching me, perched on top of a boulder a few feet away.

My entire body goes still, and I blink my eyes. Over and over again.

Slack-jawed, I try to reconcile what I’m seeing, but I can’t, because it’s not real. It can’t be. If I wasn’t in the Veil, I think I might’ve fainted, because my ears are ringing, my vision tunnelling, my head dizzy.

A pair of molten gray eyes look me up and down, and a sound like a choked sob rips from my throat. I stand frozen, waiting for this fake apparition to disappear and completely devastate me.

But instead, the ghost smirks at me. It’s his slow, flirtatious tilt of his lips that brings the blaring truth to my mind and nearly makes me fall to my knees in buckled shock. He’s really here.

Belren.

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