Acotar and Tog [Discontinued, Will be deleted]

The Princess of Secrets

He winced in pain, that last tap was a little deeper than necessary.

If someone had told him three days ago that Aelin would be in his room he would have laughed. If they had told him that they would not be trying to kill each other, he would have thought that person senile. If they had told him that he would feel lighter and calmed by her scent he would have walked them to the healing compound. But here he was sitting at his work table, talking with Aelin.

She had burned away a piece of his tattoo, the final piece that told the world he would feel his shame until his last breath. He did not want to think what that meant, that she had burned it away. The girl that had stirred feelings other than grief and shame, in him for the first time in over two hundred years.

“Tell me about how you learned to tattoo.”

“No.” He was too busy self reflecting to have a sharing moment.

“If you don’t answer my questions, I might very well make a mistake, and…”

He held back his laugh. The look in her eyes said she might have caught his slip.

“Did you learn from someone? Master and apprentice and all that?”

He gave her a rather incredulous look.

“Yes, master and apprentice and all that. In the war camps, we had a commander who used to tattoo the number of enemies he’d killed on his flesh—sometimes he’d write the whole story of a battle. All the young soldiers were enamored of it, and I convinced him to teach me.”

“With that legendary charm of yours, I suppose.”

He could not help but smile, even if it was just a half of one.

“Just fill in the spots where I—” He hissed through the pain.

“Good. That’s the right depth.”

With the rhythm of her tapping, he return to his introspective thoughts.

“Tell me about your family.”

He did not want to, his endless family that had somehow even now not given up on him. That level of love did not settle well within him, he had lost the right to be loved.

Maybe we could find the way back together

She needed this, her family was dead, what was left were distant cousins.

“Tell me about yours and I’ll tell you about mine,” he said through gritted teeth.

He waited for her response, her agreement to his terms. If they were going to do this together than they would have to bare their entire souls and the scars that ran beneath the surface.

“Fine. Are your parents alive?”

“My parents were very old when they conceived me. I was their only child in the millennia they’d been mated. They faded into the Afterworld before I reached my second decade.”

He could not remember if she had siblings.

“You had no siblings.”

She did not look at him as she began to speak, “My mother, thanks to her Fae heritage, had a difficult time with the pregnancy. She stopped breathing during labor. They said it was my father’s will that kept her tethered to this world. I don’t know if she even could have conceived again after that. So, no siblings. But—”

He waited, letting her decide if she wanted to continue that statement.

“But I had a cousin. He was five years older than me, and we fought and loved each other like siblings.”