Page 74 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

“I want to bargain for five more minutes.”

“It will cost you,” she said.

“Name your price.”

She thought about it for a moment. “Could you cut my hair?”

I ran my fingers through her long locks, and she pressed herself even closer to me. “You have yourself a bargain.”

“I'm bad at business, should have asked for more.”

“Yes, but you’re a good politician. Ruthless.”

“How was I ruthless?”

“I never had to pay a price to do things for you, to care, to want to hold you, touch you. You don’t know it, but you’re using it against me. Or maybe you do know.”

She came out of the bathroom, wearing a long cotton gown that had soaked in spots from her wet hair. After a short glance at me, she sat in front of the mirror, nervously fiddling with a piece of ribbon. “Not too short.”

I’d done it for her at least a good dozen times, but it had been ten years since she’d let me get this close to her. Not physically. To her, letting me do this meant more than any physical contact. It was the most intimate thing she’d let me do to her. So, I took my time running my fingers through her hair that had grown the longest I’d ever seen it, way past her back.

Once I’d had my fair share of admiring her, I knelt behind her, lining the scissors at her waist and cutting through her locks.

She breathed faster with each snip, her fingers digging in the velvet of the stool she sat on. When I put the comb on the vanity, she spun to look at the hair I’d cut off, but I’d been quicker. Both the scissors and the cut hair had disappeared from sight. They were gone before she’d look at them and panic like she usually did. “Done.”

With a shaky hand, she touched the ends of her hair, eyes glazing over with relief when she realised not all of it was gone. “F-feels much lighter.”

“Like it?” I asked, pushing her fringe to the side.

She straightened it back. “Yeah. Did you cut it straight?”

“You’re nitpicking so you can ask for another price.”

A small smile graced her lips, her emerald eyes shining like they had shined ten years ago. It was like time had stopped before that day. Maybe time had stopped the very first day when I pulled that hood down, when she first looked at me. She already knew a secret of mine that very first moment we met, she could see right through me.

“Why do you look guilty?” she asked me while Snow was telling Eren all that had happened.

“Guilty?”

She nodded. “When you look at Snow, I see guilt.”

“Are you going after my job now?”

“Have you ever seen yourself in the mirror? You wear that guilt like a ball gown. A big, pink and sparkly ball gown.” She pried her chestnuts from my hand and pushed the basket full of the nuts away from my reach. “So, what is it?”

Never before had I wanted to tell someone something I hid as much as I had wanted to tell her that moment. There was so much understanding in her innocent young eyes. She’d been ready to bear the weight of anything I would have told her.

“You won’t share a single chestnut with me and now you want me to share my secrets with you?”

She’d grabbed a chestnut and threw it at me. “Go on.”

Too stunned to laugh, I’d just stared at her. “I wrote off your death. Signed it. Twelve years ago, I was the one who approved the order of the attack. Not my brother.”

Thora glanced at her sister, not a single reaction crossing her features. I’d been so tempted to just read her, but I wanted to see if I could read her just as well as she could read me without magic. “Snow seems to think it was your brother.”

“Yes.”

“Then you better stop looking at her like that if you don’t want her to know.”