Once I got them all, I tossed the whole pile in the general direction of my nightstand and shook out my long hair. Pulling the uncomfortable dress off, I decided to just sleep in my underwear.
Staring out into the dark of my room, I waited to see if the past would come calling once more.
I tumbled through my memories again, but this time was different. They didn’t flow past me in a nice chronological order. They were jumbled, chaotic. I was flung from scene to scene, catching only snippets.
I listened to Dey tell the seamstress that I liked the dress before she left, then the scene rewound to the beginning, and I heard Dey apologizing for our tardiness. “Truly we meant no offense to one so talented as yourself,” he said.
Like a ragdoll, I was thrown to the ground in another memory. I lifted my head to see the young guard that had taken me to the dungeons.
“I will surely be beaten if I take you down there.”
I didn’t have a second to feel bad for what I had done before I was falling into another moment in time.
I tried to close my eyes when I saw the glittering city appear around me, but there was no hiding inside my head.
“Sacrilegious!”
“How dare an abicario use the Shen’Valla shroud to sneak in here?”
“She will pay in blood for her blasphemy.”
I was helpless to do anything but listen to the insults and watch the mob nearly beat me to death.
For once, I welcomed the forceful tug that hurled me through a tunnel of memories and deposited me in the dining hall where I saw Dey clasping my hands.
“I wish I could stay with you today, but Sin will take good care of you, I promise. He might seem a little rough, but he is very skilled and will train you well,” Dey said.
“I’ll be fine. I can handle grumpy pants over there.”
“I might not be so grumpy if he would keep his damn hands off of you,” Sin muttered.
The scene reversed around me then, everyone moving backward like a tape rewinding.
Action resumed as I heard Sin telling my father he thought he was restraining an intruder, but quickly realized I was far too inept to be an assassin. Now I knew what made my father laugh. Thanks, Sin.
I could feel the pull alerting me that I was about to be tossed again, but I let his name solidify in my mind.
Sin. Focus on Sin. I wanted to see more of him. Hear all the things he kept from me.
It worked too well. Suddenly my brain was flooded with memories of him, all jumbled up and bouncing around like my mind couldn’t pick just one. Fractured glimpses of time, each one passing by before I could latch on.
Sin walking away from me at our first training session.“I won’t let you kill yourself. Not for him.”
Sin talking to Dey on the roof after their fight. “You said that you could take care of her.”
Sin yelling at Dey outside his room. “Neither of us are good enough for her!”
Faster the memories flew by me, little more than hiccups, then gone once more.
“And it’ll happen again because you can’t always protect her.”
“Because you are too reckless for your own good.”
“She doesn’t need your hands groping her right now.”
Suddenly, Sin was kneeling by me in the arena, and I recognized immediately that it was the moment I bared my soul after begging him to hurt me. My heart stopped as I recognized the emotion I hadn’t been able to identify at the time. The painful tenderness I saw hiding in the depths of his green eyes that had been so foreign that I dismissed it as unimportant. Maybe I hadn’t realized what it was because I had never seen it before. Never felt it before.
“Your back is not disgusting, Rain. You could never be disgusting to me. But I won’t make it worse.” He paused, then added softly, “I love you too much.”
