As the knights talked amongst themselves, Crow was quickly distracted once again by a dull twinge of pain in his torso that drew his attention away from their conversation. He knitted his brow in a slightly stressed manner, wanting to pull at the bandages again to make it stop, but too weak to remove his free hand from Penelope’s. The ceaseless discomfort irritated him, and he didn’t like the fact that he wasn’t able to do anything to deal with it. If only she would just [i]listen[/i] to him that the wrapping needed to come off, then maybe he could make the pain go away. After all, it seemed like the best idea to him.

He turned back to try and convince her again but paused as he caught what the knights were saying. It sounded like they were planning to ask him another question, although Penelope didn’t look very happy about the decision. Glancing between their somewhat-distorted faces, he tipped his head to the side confusedly. He had thought they were done playing Olivia’s game when she started talking to her comrades instead of him. Apparently, that guess had been wrong. He wondered what they would ask him next, and if the chosen question was the reason why Penelope seemed so upset.

Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long to find out. As Olivia queried what secret he kept that Penelope didn’t know about, the thief had to take another moment to think it over. There were plenty of things about him that she didn’t know, but that wasn’t because the information was necessarily [i]secret[/i]. It just hadn’t come up in conversation before. She already knew all of his deepest secrets, such as his name, who his family was, and some of the more life-changing incidents in his past. Anything else he could have shared with her would have just been stories of his childhood or more recent history.

He supposed he had sort of kept his encounters with other women a secret from her, but that was done more so out of respect for her than anything else. If she ever bothered to ask him about it, he wouldn’t hesitate to be open with her, so he didn’t think that counted as a secret either. The thief chewed on the inside of his lip for a moment as he wracked his brain to come up with something worth saying in answer to Olivia’s question. Suddenly, he blinked as he came up with a response.

“There is [i]one[/i] thing,” Crow said slowly. He averted his gaze with a bashful expression. “I never told her, but… two years ago, I was going to ask Penelope to marry me in Farhill.” He glanced up with a sheepish smile, slightly red-faced from the confession. “And I plan to ask her as soon as this war is over… I want to spend the rest of my life with her.”