His spine curves as he reaches, and I can see every muscle in his back flex and strain.
God, his back.
It's a landscape of power and pain.
Broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist.
Muscles carved from years of training, of fighting, of surviving things that would kill lesser men. His skin is tan, smooth except for?—
The scars.
Four of them, scattered across his shoulder blades and lower back.
Bullet wounds, he told me in the safe room.
The ones that didn't go through.
In the dim light of Dublin, they'd looked silvered and old.
Healed.
They don't look healed now.
They're red.
Angry.
Inflamed from pressure, from nights spent on a mattress that should have been thrown out years ago.
The skin around them is swollen, irritated, probably painful as hell.
I can see him favoring one side, trying to stretch in a way that doesn't pull at the worst of the damage.
My heart clenches.
He's been hiding this.
For three days, he's been walking around like everything is fine, like his body isn't screaming at him with every movement.
Stubborn, self-sacrificing idiot.
And there's the mattress itself.
I knew it was bad.
I'd seen it briefly when we first arrived.
But seeing it now—really seeing it—makes my stomach turn.
The center sags so deeply it practically touches the floor. Springs poke through the fabric in multiple places, some of them rusty and sharp-looking.
The frame beneath is metal, bent, held together by stubbornness and prayers.
There's even a spring that's completely broken through the top, coiled and exposed like a trap waiting to snap.
He's been sleeping onthis. For three nights. With those scars.
No wonder he can't sleep.
