Page 47 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

There was a long stretch of silence as I walked to my bed.

“No arguments, no pushing me out, or asking me to leave?” he asked, throwing a shirt over his body.

With shaky fingers I undid the back of my dress, letting the heavy fabric pool to my feet. “Do as you wish. I’m too tired to entertain you.” No matter how hard I tried to grasp the laces of my corset, I couldn’t force my grip to tighten and pull on them. My fingers had cramped entirely from shooting all afternoon.

Just when I gave up and decided to sleep with it on, his fingers were grazing mine, pushing my hand away as he tugged on my corset lace and began pulling the links loose with ease. He stepped closer, dousing me in his freshly showered eucalyptus scent. “When have you started wearing these?”

“Some time ago.”

“And your shooting?”

“It actually helps.” I turned a little to look at him over my shoulder. “How did you know I still shoot?”

He ghosted a finger over my chin, barely touching my skin yet I shivered. “That little burn on your chin from the string.” His finger moved up towards my lip, and for the first time in a long while I felt the pull to lean into someone’s touch, not push away. He might have noticed that too because his touch got bolder, fingers fully exploring the skin down my neck and down towards my arm until he had my hand in his. “The mark from the fletching. The dents between your middle finger and index. The slight tilt to the left of your shoulders. You must have just come back from shooting.”

He was such a darned idiot. “You saw me, didn’t you?”

That wolfish grin returned on his face. “Question is, how did you not? I was right there the whole time.”

“You were not,” I said, trying to spin to him, but he was still firmly holding onto the corset laces.

He stepped closer to me, and his scent of eucalyptus and autumn rain washed over me. “Three hours. I thought your fingers were going to start bleeding. When the arrows stopped coming, you started shooting nothing.”

“That isn’t true.”

He continued pulling the rest of the laces off. “Isn’t it?”

“Someone would have told me.”

“You mean the two soldiers who were about to piss their knickers when you began nocking back invisible arrows? Sure.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He pinched my chin, pulling my face back to him. “Three hours, Thora. How much longer would you have gone if I’d not sent Elias to shake you off?”

He’d sent Elias? Never mind that. Why had he gotten so close to me? “Why didn’t you call for me?”

“Didn’t know how you would react. Elias seemed to be the safest option at the time,” he gritted out. “Perhaps the last time.”

I sucked in a sharp breath when the corset came loose and dropped to the ground with the rest of my garments, leaving me in a cotton chemise.

“That’s more like it,” he murmured, touching the little rosy ribbon that cinched the waist of the thin material. “I was wondering where they’d gone.”

His hand remained there for some time, playing with the little ribbon while my gaze was fixed on his left arm. I remembered his body better than I remembered my own, it didn’t take me long to notice there was something different. Without thinking about it first, my hand wrapped around his wrist, and I fully turned to him.

Between the thick old tattoos, there were new ones—not fresh, just not the ones I remembered him having before. They were dainty, almost amateurish and cartoonish compared to the rest. They were not designs made by someone who knew what they were doing. Because they were done by…me. A long time ago.

Chapter twelve

The Past

Thora

Twice now he’d fallen asleep in the library as we searched for answers to Aurora’s weakness. Though, I was thankful he wasn’t falling asleep on the tavern floor or some dark alley where I couldn’t find him. At least he was sleeping. At least one of us was.

His sleeves were pulled back, revealing a map of tattoos and another path of scattered scars and burns. To know how to inflict pain on every inch of someone’s body, you have to know how that pain feels on every inch of your own. That is what he’d told me.

My fingers shook as I lowered them to trace a long burn. The more of it I touched, the more did my own skin burn, like I’d been the one to get that scar. And it hurt, it hurt the same. Like someone had pressed a scalding iron rod all over me. It had hurt the same, it had burned the same when he’d told me the story of how he’d gotten it.