Acotar and Tog [Discontinued, Will be deleted]

Then Go Get Her

Mor sat back shaking her head. “You’ve got a lot of talking to do.”

“Well let’s do it in the bath, shall we,” Cassian said, hauling himself under my shoulders once more. Mor took the other side. “You smell like shit and I don’t care what Mor says. Feyre’s never gonna fuck you like this - mate or not.”

I didn’t have time to retort before Mor had winnowed us into the upstairs bathroom, cackling in my ear as we landed.

Cassian and Mor weren’t wrong. I looked miserable.

After they’d cleaned me up and made sure I had enough strength to withstand a few minutes alone, they exited to my shared room with Cassian so I could relieve myself and just take a moment. The image reflected back at me in the mirror was me, but it wasn’t at the same time.

With the mud and blood vanished, I could see the damage that had been hiding underneath, and it was enough that I stopped thinking about Feyre for more than a few minutes at last. Her blood had done a lot in that short space of time to clean me up, but my skin was peppered with bruises and fresh new scars littered my wings in horrible sea-sick green and yellow blotches that disrupted the patchwork of red and gold in the veining. And my skin was sallow looking, the bags atop my cheeks full and puffy. Inside, my body screamed.

I bent over and rolled the cuffs of my pants up to my knees. The slits where the ash arrows had struck my calves were sealed now, but four new scars throbbing crimson marked the occasion. I hadn’t wanted to look when Cass had poured over them helping me clean up in the tub, Mor applying a salve carefully to my wings.

First Lucien, which was really Tamlin. And then Hybern. The Attor had informed us of Hybern’s movements in Illyrian territory from months ago. Was it coincidence they’d found us and sought to take advantage? Or was it planned? Where Tamlin had failed, had Hybern somehow... stepped in? I buried the thought.

A light knock sounded on the bathroom door. “Rhys?” Cassian pushed the door open just as I stood up, and the motion of standing upright again must have changed the pressure in my head because suddenly, the room started spinning and I wasn’t sure if I was seeing one version of Cassian or three.

I just heard my brother curse and the sound of Mor’s feet running behind him before he caught me and I blacked out.

Five days. That’s how long it took before I was fit again. Before any residual swelling had disappeared, I could think coherently, and the bruises existed only in memory.

The downside, of course, being that as my body’s pain went down, my heart’s increased exponentially.

Mor wouldn’t leave my room for practically anything. It took Azriel’s visit the day after I’d winnowed into camp to get her back downstairs, and even then she came back with Az in tow. Cassian explained it all to me in detail one afternoon after she’d stepped out for the toilet. Apparently, I’d been asleep for all of it.

Azriel only stayed long enough to check in before the shadows sent him chasing back to the mortal lands. Whether it was an excuse to ditch out of a miserable home he hated or because Nesta and Elain had gained word from the queens, I didn’t care.

The only thing I did seem to care about besides hunting Hybern down like a pig and slaughtering him from one end to the next, was Feyre. Finding her, holding her, making sure she was okay. I’d been so addled in our escape, I hadn’t even been able to see if any of those arrows had hurt her, and it didn’t matter how many times Mor assured me they hadn’t; I wanted to see it for myself.

But Mor was silent as the grave about where she’d taken Feyre when she wasn’t otherwise chewing my ear off with admonitions or making me drink this or that. Cassian laughed from the other side of the room the entire way through it, only leaving to check in with the Illyrian females and make sure Devlon was letting them train.