Crow held his breath, hoping Penelope would hear the edge in his voice and drop the subject. He’d already given her an answer, even if it had been a vague one. Surely that was enough now that she knew he had gotten himself worked up over nothing more than a dream. There was no more reason for her to be concerned about him when she knew that he wasn’t in danger or otherwise hiding anything crucial from her. As he’d said, it really hadn’t been important.

However, the knight didn’t seem to agree. As she shifted to lay on him more comfortably, he groaned inwardly, already expecting that she wasn’t going to let it go as he wanted. “You just can’t make this easy on me, can you?” he grumbled, lifting his arm to rest across his eyes in exasperation. Part of him still wanted to refuse to go into detail—especially since it was already late, and he was worried that if he described the nightmare now, it would be more likely to return when he slept—but he knew that now that she’d fixed her mind on it, she wasn’t going to drop it until he gave her an answer she deemed acceptable.

 After a long pause, he took a slow breath, deciding it would be less painful to just get it over with now than deal with her pestering later on, and shifted to drape his arm over her back. “I don’t remember if I’ve told you this before, but when I was younger—long before we ever met—I used to have the same nightmare every night,” he started, finally meeting her gaze. “It started after the… [i]incident[/i] in that village, where I got the scar on my side.” His voice became slightly absent as he went on. The memory of the slaughter always stirred uncomfortable emotions inside of him when he dwelled on it, so he found it easier to simply detach from the feelings.

“The dream always started out the same way. I was standing in the marketplace with a crowd of people who were just going about their normal routines. Nothing was wrong, but I’d always get this feeling that I was in danger. Eventually, it would get too overwhelming to ignore, and the sky would turn red just before the market changed into the bloodbath that I remember.” He shuddered at the image. “When that happened, I would run to take cover, but a knight would cut me off. He’d stab me with his sword, and I would wake up.”

His expression turned bleak, “It’s been years since the last time I’ve had that dream, but it came back last night… and this time, it didn’t end the same way.” He held her a little closer as the nightmare replayed in his head. “When the knight stabbed me, I closed my eyes as I normally would, but instead of waking up, I was suddenly back in Jaxon’s camp with his sword through my chest instead. He was the one who killed me before I woke up this time.”

Finished recounting the morbid dream, he fell silent for a moment and then shook his head. “I know it shouldn’t bother me as much as it did. It was just vivid,” he sighed and then wavered as he decided whether or not he should tell her that Preston had heard him scream the night before. Ultimately, he saw no reason to cause her to worry about it, so he omitted that detail. “I guess I’m just a little nervous that it could start recurring again,” he admitted in a reluctant voice.