{A Wattpad Featured Book}
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Her heart or her people. Only she can decide.
Hated, cursed, outcasted. It was Eleena Asterin's life ever since she was blamed to have betrayed her village. So when she is offered a task to earn back her honour and prid...
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Oberon might have been cocky grins and vulgarity most of the time, but in the sparring ring in a grass-framed courtyard in the manor that morning, he was a stone-cold killer.
And when those lethal instincts were turned on me ...
Beneath all the silk and cotton of my tunic, even with the crisp temperature, my skin was slick with sweat. Each breath ravaged my throat, and my arms trembled so badly that any time I so much as tried to use my fingers, my pinkie would start shaking uncontrollably.
I was watching it wobble of its own accord when Oberon closed the gap between us, gripped my hand, and said, "This is because you're hitting on the wrong knuckles. Top two—pointer and middle finger—that's where the punches should connect. Hitting here," he said, tapping a callused finger on the already bruised bit of skin in the vee between my pinkie and ring finger, "will do more damage to you than to your opponent. You're lucky the Baphomet didn't want to get into a fistfight."
We'd been going at it for an hour now, walking through the basic steps of hand-to-hand combat. And it turned out that I might have been good at hunting, at archery, but using my left side? Pathetic. I was as uncoordinated as a newborn fawn attempting to walk. Punching and stepping with the left side of my body at once had been nearly impossible, and I'd stumbled into Oberon more often than I'd hit him. The right punches—those were easy.
"Get a drink," he said. "Then we're working on your core. No point in learning how to punch if you can't even hold your stance."
I frowned toward the sound of clashing blades in the open sparring ring next to us.
Nolan, surprisingly, had decided to spar one of the lone sentries in the hallway. Oberon was not happy about it as he'd disobeyed his orders, yet I knew he was taking this time to assess the problems at hand.
Assess—and brood, it seemed, since Nolan had barely managed a polite hello to us before launching into sparring with the poor sentry, his face grim and tight. They'd been at it now for an hour straight, their slender blades like flashes of quicksilver as they moved around and around. I wondered if it was as much for practice as it was for the sentry to help his commander work off his frustration.
At some point since I'd last looked, despite the misty spring day, they'd removed their leather jackets and shirts.
My eyes flicked to Nolan and it became a struggle to breathe. His tan, muscled back was covered with the writing—the Fae Language, I realised—the ink flowing across his shoulder blades and down the column of his spine, all the way to his lower back, right beneath where they typically strapped their blades.
"Some of us get tattoos after coming back from war—they're the names of the people we lost, and the people we've killed. Though, Nolan is the only one who does that. He still bears the scars of his past, never lets them heal," Oberon said, his voice soft as he followed my stare. I doubted Oberon was drinking in the rest of the image, though: the stomach muscles gleaming with sweat in the bright sun, the bunching of their powerful thighs, the rippling strength in their backs, all produced in one beautiful creature.
