I didn't know you were doing prompts again! If you're still up for it could you do a dirkjake with the word assassin? If not its no biggie! love your work though, big fan!!

He’s a toned glimmer of a prince swathed in sleek, golden sheets. Coy, in the way he tilts his head, breathes out, opens his mouth just wide enough to catch a glint of his front teeth. His legs shift against his bedspread.

“Hello,” he says, like he’s been expecting you. Something about the acceptance in his posture tells you that might be the case.

“Hi,” you reply, unsure, the grip on your knife flexing in your palm.

“She sent you, then?”

You frown. “Yes.”

“Right,” he says. Sighs. “Right, right. Pity.”

You move towards the bed and he makes no attempt to defend himself. You press a knee the mattress to lift yourself up and above and he stays there—maybe sinks a few centimeters down, into the excessive amount of pillows.

You hold the knife to his neck. He opens his mouth again.

“Does she call herself your mother, too?” your prince, your prey, asks.

You freeze with the blade against his throat.

“…Yes,” you say, because after having his kingdom overtaken by a bloated empire and its condescending queen, he deserves the truth.

The prince nods. The action splits a thin slice in the skin of his neck.

“Pity,” he says again. His eyes glance up at you, deep and green and too alive to be nearly dead. “It’s quite cruel of her, you know. I would have preferred to have not been killed by my own brother.”

You don’t pull the knife away, but your mind drifts to the forest. Crunchy autumn paths and warm companions on an endless, breathless trek. You think of streams, and cold ankles, and bowstrings, and your first kill—a button buck, with too alive eyes.

The Empress asked you for the prince’s heart delivered to her on a quite literal silver platter. You wonder, now, if she call tell the difference between it and the heart of a buck. She surely has little in her chest to reference.