She swallowed.
“What it was like. What you . . .” Her fingers slid down his arm, never leaving his skin. Greyson’s heart rate began to accelerate. “I knew hewas a monster. But I didn’t know . . . I never imagined what it was like for you. Living with him.”
He couldn’t have anticipated the severity of the impact those words would hit him with, unexpected and devastating in their simple honesty. He looked away, unable to bear the weight of her gaze.
“No one does,” he said after a moment of silence, forcing his eyes back to her face.
Her hand fell away from his skin, slipping into her lap, and the sudden absence of her touch, her warmth, made his throat constrict.
Greyson forced himself not to reach for her.
“He killed my parents,” Shadera said, her voice almost a whisper. “Twenty years ago, I watched him kill my parents on that platform because they were from different rings. Because they chose love over law.”
She lifted her eyes back to his, and the pain he saw raging there could have brought him to his knees.
“I-I’m sorry.” She forced the words out.
“For what?” Greyson asked, genuinely confused.
She cleared her throat, bringing her hands back to his shoulder. He sucked in a sharp breath at the contact, not from pain—but comfort.
“For assuming you were just like him.” She secured a bandage over the entrance wound. “For thinking that because you’re his son, the Executioner, this was a life you chose. That you wanted to kill innocents—that you enjoyed it.”
The statement from her lips was a blade sliding between his ribs, finding the heart of a truth he rarely acknowledged even to himself.
He hadn’t chosen any of this.
“That doesn’t excuse what I’ve done,” he said, the words thick in his throat. “The choices I’ve made, the people I’ve—” He cut himself off, unable to finish.
“No,” she agreed, andthere was no absolution in her voice, no forgiveness. “It doesn’t. But it explains more than I understood before.”
Her eyes moved over his face, studying him openly now. He wondered what version of him she saw at that moment—the Executioner, the heir, the broken man? All of them at once? All equally true, equally false.
“Earlier,” she started, changing the subject, “you said something about my mask bearing your mark. What did you mean?”
The question was a lifeline, a shift away from the truth of what he’d done, and he was grateful for it. He exhaled slowly, considering his answer.
“All Executioners have a mark,” he explained. “A symbol that identifies them, that becomes associated with their . . . work, in the Veyra ranks. Mine is a skull.”
“A tattoo?” she asked, her eyes scanning what she could see of his chest, noting the scars but no visible mark.
“Yes.” He hesitated, then made a decision.
If she was going to understand—truly understand the man they were up against—she needed to see. All of it.
Slowly, he pulled his shirt fully from his body, letting it fall to the floor as he turned away from her, presenting his back. Her sharp intake of breath told him she saw it—the skull tattooed across his entire back, identical to the one on her mask. Black ink embedded in skin that was a roadmap of scars and burns and lash marks. Some surgical, most jagged and brutal. Evidence of years of “discipline” at his father’s hands.
“This is my mark,” he said quietly, still facing away from her. “My fucked up legacy.”
Her fingers brushed his skin, so light he might have imagined it if not for the warmth that followed the path of her touch as she traced one of the scars that crossed the skull.
“And these?” she asked, her voice reverent. “Are they your legacy too?”
Greyson closed his eyes, fighting the unexpected surge of emotion her touch evoked. “No. They’re my education.”
She reached for a pack of gauze and tape without speaking, quickly cleaning the exit wound before packing it and sealing it off. Her fingers took one last dance across his flesh, feeling the ridges of his pain before her hand stilled against his back, a point of warmth in the cold room. Then it withdrew, leaving him feeling strangely bereft.
“Greyson,” she said, and the sound of his name in her voice, without title or mockery or disdain, made something ache inside him. “Look at me.”
