There’s a certain little voice that sometimes devils readers of adventure fiction, belonging to a quite wicked imp of practicality, and it says: you would not survive this. [i]You[/i] are not a protagonist, little reader: the hero will only escape because everything aligns just so. Redana Claudius was not often bedeviled so. Skotia, however, for all that he is a creature of romance— he knows this voice. And the voice is saying: if you fight this monster, you will die. Your concentration will slip at a vital moment; you will fail to dodge a falling pillar; you will be backhanded through a mural and off a cliff to your death. This creature is too dangerous for Bella, killer of princes, so what do you think you’re doing?

Paying for the last kiss he’ll ever give her, is what he’s doing.

His palms are dry. His heart aches in his chest. He is shaking as he draws his sword with a duelist’s flourish, one wrist beneath the other, tip at attention. His feet find their marks with rote ease. An ELF cracks out and he flicks it away as if training in the courtyards of an imperial palace.

Bella is screaming at him to move. But that, too, is part of the story. It’s about his [i]character.[/i] The lothario promises everything and then proves himself false, a coward, selfish. The true lover allows his love to carry him into the maw of Leviathan, and then— well, it depends on what sort of story this is, isn’t it? Maybe he’s only here to die in front of Bella, to save her and her Beautiful, to make amends, and maybe at the end she’ll realize that her Redana— but no. He’s past that now. All he is is a desperate gamble by a selfish princess to do one thing right for her oldest, dearest friend.

Nobody in those stories had the decency to mention the dryness at the corner of his eyes, the right clench of his asshole, the neon throb of ELF weapons in the dark pounding in the back of his head. Fuck.

([i]The look on her face, confusion and trepidation that she hadn’t recognized when she reached down into the box— the look on her face, pale, eyes lidless wide, her hand trembling as she hissed through bloodless lips at her princess— the look on her face, hidden in the dark but obvious enough, the longing for someone who was right for her, who could give her a love untainted by failure and failure and failure—[/i])

“[i]Avaunt.[/i]” The world narrows to the dark and the light. His body is moving to parry another shot before his mind has caught up. The blade throbs from tip to insulated hilt. “I will kill you if you touch her,” he says, and he means it, even if he doesn’t know if he can. How’s [i]this[/i] for a storybook, dearest and best of maids? How’s [i]this[/i] for the Maneater, the filler of graves, the doom of cities? How’s [i]this[/i] for choosing you? “[i]Avaunt![/i]” His voice is too small for the heart it carries; it cracks beneath the weight.

And this is the moment. This is why Aphrodite raised him up from the shadows to be the prince of the night. For this, and this alone; and all outcomes, then, are part of his song. End of the line! Curtain fall! And what are you in the dark, Skotia, in that heart of hearts, standing so small and pathetic in front of a living nightmare, while you stand between the protagonist and her doom?

Not a coward.

Not with Bella on the line.

He digs his heels in and screams his defiance in the face of death herself:

“[i]Av—![/i]”