OUR FOREST OF THORNS | tbosas ✔️

030 || One More Wrong

CHAPTER THIRTY —        One More Wrong ..

______________________

          "I am sorry," Daphne sighed, tapping with a single finger coated in medical cream over the cut across Coriolanus upper and bottom lip. Though it's only been two days since the unfortunate incident resulting in two unanticipated casualties, his cut had already begun to heal into a scar, something she couldn't say however about her own guilt, not the other bruises the altercation had left on his body.

He had long since suspected she blamed herself for what had happened out there, but this was the first time they actually had the time to sit down together and talk about it. Daphne had decided to word out an apology as the beginning of this conversation — it was an apology Coriolanus did not need. He, quite like her, had had time to think through what had happened and he concluded many things, amongst which most significant stood his realization that he wasn't upset with Daphne. He doubted he could ever really be upset with her. 

"I'm not," he reassured her, speaking quietly in an attempt to not move his lips much and thus not disturb her from her work. After all, it was exactly for her tender touch and that enjoyable sting of pain it left under his cut that he sat in that chair before her own every night and every morning. He imagined that since she's the one who will be kissing his lips, it's up to her to decide if she wants that cut's scar to be faint or more pronounced, because he for one did not care much about it — had it been up to him, Coriolanus wouldn't have deemed this medicine necessary.

"Well, I shouldn't have said it anyway," Daphne affirmed in return, so clearly fighting back a yawn. She hasn't been sleeping much and though the night they spent on the bumpy road getting them to the Northern province Cress has taken over to establish the new mining site was justifiably one without rest, the previous one, first spent in the tent she was given amidst their improvised camp, was one that proved stress has once again taken an iron grip over her mind. In anticipation, remembering far too well how things went while she had worked on the poison, her body ached for the many more sleepless nights to come. "I shouldn't have asked you to kill her," she continued, lowering her hand from his face and thus dropping her gaze too. 

"I didn't kill her for you."  Coriolanus didn't waste a second with doubting his instincts, but instead followed them such that his hand found hers to hold. "I killed her for us. She'd seen too much and we could always do without liabilities left loose in the world," he spoke his stone cold reasoning, surprised to discover it wouldn't chill him in the slightest to hear himself regard deaths with such nonchalance. "Wrong as it may sound," he appreciated next, averting his gaze until he had their hands within sight, not her eyes, "and this may surprise you yet, I wanted her dead too."

"Trust me, I feel horrible about that part too," she sighed, not planning on letting go of Coriolanus' hand even as she sat up from her chair and walked that single step which separated them over. "You didn't deserve being doubted like that," Daphne didn't hesitate admitting, much as she didn't hesitate making herself comfortable in his lap, even if to do so she had to shift a couple of times in a motion excruciatingly close to how he knew she looked while riding on top of him.

Clearly, given that once their chests were flushed together Daphne leant forward and wrapped her arms around him in a warm embrace, she didn't mean to make his mind wonder to such places, so Coriolanus tightened his jaw and employed each fragment of self control he still had in him to merely stay still. Just as clearly it became to him then, when her head rested beneath his shoulder and she hid her face in their embrace while her hands clung to his uniform, that Daphne didn't care much for the possibility of them being walked in on, a possibility ever higher since they were in a campaign tent, after all.