After Raising Ace

To Ace, Zelda was an unexpected turn in his life.

He should have grown up amid the chaos of the Goa Kingdom and reached the age of seventeen. But when he was ten, some unreasonable guy forcibly took him and his brothers aboard a ship.

They ate together, studied together, and went on adventures together.

That handsome blond spent all day lounging around, ordering them to do this and that, and, infuriatingly, turning the ship into something that felt like home.

Those were the happiest days of Ace's life.

Ace always got up first each morning. He'd polish the ship until it gleamed, all so that the lazybones could rest a hand on his bowed head, pat him a few times, and praise him for being good.

His hands were beautiful, too, pale and slender, with a faint smell of cigarettes always clinging to his fingertips. Mixed with the warmth of his body, it kept Ace tossing and turning at night.

He even secretly hid a pack of his cigarettes by his bed. He didn't smoke them, just smelled them.

But it still wasn't enough.

Zelda had a past and friends of his own, and Ace's name was nowhere among them.

He just wanted to crush that pure, blank-sheet-of-paper kind of person in his arms, smooth him flat, then mark every inch of him with his own traces.

Every time Ace saw him, he felt the blood of a future Pirate King, the blood that craved conquest, boil in his veins.

And yet he still had to obediently call him, "Sir."

[Reading Guide:

1. They are not adoptive father and son.

2. The protagonist is not a self-sacrificing saint. He respects life and doesn't kill indiscriminately.

3. There is no romance while the characters are minors in the early chapters.]

Message: Treasure what you have