Page 66 of Of Sins and Sacrifice

I continue to glare at him as I wait for him to insult me some more. He’s done that from the moment we met.

“What am I then?”

“You’re a little troublemaker,” he says with a smile.

There! I was right. First, he called me an odd duck—I still have not forgotten that, though he tried to explain it’s an idiom or whatever—and now he calls me a troublemaker.

“I am not!” I burst out. “I am a perfectly respectable working lady,” I say with a humph.

“A perfectly respectable working lady?” He laughs. “One who pranks soldiers with dead rats, steals food, and then lies about being a nurse? Oh, and let us not forget about this incident right here,” he says as he pours some more disinfectant over my wound and wipes the blood away.

“W-what?” I stammer.

Certainly, he did see me steal food and use the dead rat as a weapon of distraction. But how would he know that I’m lying about being a nurse? Even the doctor was fooled by my perfect impression of one.

“Iama nurse,” I feel compelled to add.

“Sure, sure, Minnie darling. Youarea nurse—one who doesn’t know how to bandage a small wound.”

“But I do! I patched you up, didn’t I?” I protest, nearly jumping out of my seat. He holds me still, not letting me go anywhere.

“Shoddily.”

I blink. I do not know what that means, but I am not about to make a fool of myself and ask. I’ll just assume it’s something bad.

“It was my first day,” I mutter.

He merely smiles.

I scowl at him. But then it registers how he called me.

Minnie darling.

“My name is Mina, not Minnie,” I tell him squarely. “Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean you can change it.”

“Minnie suits you better. It’s cute, just like you.” He winks at me.

My eyes widen.

I swallow.

He thinks I’m…cute?

Heat travels up my neck.

“It’s stillnotmy name,” I argue weakly.

“Sure, Minnie,” he replies in an amused tone.

“You! Stop that!”

“No can do, Minnie darling. Besides”—he pauses to clear his throat—“it rhymes better.”

“Rhymes better with what?”

He starts whistling as he rolls the bandage over my wound. He doesn’t reply to me.

“Rhymes with what, you infuriating male?” I demand again.

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