Page 84 of The Prince's Mage

But then he was kissing her jaw and then her neck. Her scars. He was kissing along the scars on her neck that wound along her vitae paths, and she couldn’t stop her soft gasp as she felt her vitae start to boil with her blood in response. Their left wrists were glowing. His grip on her waist tightened, but he stilled, resting his forehead against her shoulder. She could feel his heavy breaths on her skin.

The glow emanating from the lines of their wrists faded.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “I did not mean—I… You make it easy to get carried away.”

Marcella stayed perfectly still, her own breath struggling to catch up. That… That was a memory to last a lifetime, and yet, she still felt it woefully inadequate. How could she spend the rest of her life knowing she’d had this and lost it?

She whispered, “I love you.”

His grip on her back loosened, and she thought maybe he hadn’t been able to hear her well enough to translate it. So she whispered again in his tongue, “Gavril, I love you.”

She then jolted as he pulled her closer again, wrapping both of his arms around her waist as he buried his face into her curls. He said, “I’d beg you to say it again, but if you do…deliciae, I heard it. That is enough for tonight. Promise me… Promise me that you will say it again after tomorrow night.”

“I will,” Marcella said, uncurling her fingers from his hair and sinking into his grip. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She tried to keep her voice from breaking as she said, “I will.”

Even if he wouldn’t want to hear it, it would always be true.

Chapter30

MARCELLA

Like the day of the banquet, Marcella was woken up by Aimilia tearing in like a tornado and declaring Marcella was not to see Gavril until she was ‘fixed.’

At least this time when Aimilia dragged Marcella to the bathhouse she knew what to expect, and Aimilia didn’t so much as even look in her direction or give so much as a hint of grief about Marcella’s modesty regarding her scars.

It was a similarly excruciating process for Aimilia to do Marcella’s hair again. This time in an even more complicated procedure that Aimilia declared wasn’t working halfway through and had to start over, much to Marcella’s dismay.

Why couldn’t she just have her curls loose and wild?

Apparently Inimicus women did not have their hair loose for formal occasions.

“I am not Inimicus,” Marcella insisted.

Aimilia raised an eyebrow. “The whole point of this is that there is no difference between you and an Inimicus woman. So you need to look the part.”

The red-haired girl had her there. So Marcella let herself be subjected to it and at least Aimilia painfully tugging at Marcella’s hair helped distract her from the turning of her stomach and the weight on her shoulders.

Finally, Aimilia was satisfied with Marcella’s hair and Marcella had swatted her hands away enough times for her to give up on her cosmetics—despite huffing and insisting it was not immoral to put a little bit of kohl around her eyes and redden her lips. The Inimicus pulled out a new peplos for Marcella to wear. Marcella had no idea where the other girl was getting them, considering she was taller than Marcella. Enough for it to make a difference in size, so that it couldn’t be from her own wardrobe.

Aimilia was gone and Marcella changed again. She let out a long sigh when she saw it was similar to the last one, exposing her arms, most of her shoulders, and a fair amount of her back where it was easiest to see the scars running along her vitae paths. She did, however, find Gavril’s cloak and was starting to put it on when his door opened and he stepped into her room.

He said, “Are you ready?”

“Almost,” she said as she finished clasping his cloak. Once it was secure and her scars hidden, she turned to him and nodded. He frowned at her arms hidden beneath the fabric.

He stepped forward, reaching for her hands that were twisted into the fabric. He slowly uncurled her fingers and said, “It is up to you, but since you will need both your arms free… may I?”

Marcella wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but it was Gavril so she nodded anyway. He then reached up and started fussing with the way the cloak was draped over her, unclasping it and rearranging it to his satisfaction before reclasping it. He shifted so he stood behind her in the mirror.

Marcella gasped, but it wasn’t just because he loosely wrapped an arm around her waist as he did so. He’d arranged the cloak so it was still on her—the clasp and the pattern showing clearly who the original owner of the cloak was—but it hung off one shoulder, the clasp at her neck, letting the skin her peplos exposed be seen as well. She could feel the air on her back and she knew part of that was still visible as well. This arrangement meant she wore the cloak with her scars still mostly on display.

With his other hand, Gavril’s finger brushed the scar on her neck before shifting down to trace the thin, raised lines on her shoulders. He whispered, “Make them face what they have done. To you. To countless others when you prove we are not different people at all. Show them the horror and the atrocity and pointlessness it all was.”

Marcella took a long deep breath as Gavril’s fingers came to a stop, resting on the raised scar on the inside of her left wrist, cutting through the lines marking it. The lines glowed softly at his touch, his vitae beneath her skin rising to meet the familiar touch.

“I will.”

He pressed a kiss to the underside of her jaw where the line of one of the scars started and said, “Then let us go change the world,mea spes.”

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