I go rigid, my head shaking.
When he hobbles a step forward, his face contorts into a grimace. Hojat starts to rush over to go help him. “You should really be in bed, Sir Digby…”
My stubborn guard holds up his hand to ward him off, and with painstaking steps, he limps all the way over to me. When he stops in front of me, when we’re eye to eye, he just stands here, watching me.
No words. No argument or reasoning. He doesn’t need them. There’s so much more right there in his watery gaze.
Simply looking back at him makes my heart squeeze into itself, makes my ears scream with memory.
Miss Auren.
I’m going to save you.
Hold her.
You brought this on yourself, Auren.
Then, the screams.
It’s all there. In the deepest, sharpest crevices. In the most frightening, sunken-in abyss. The sound of a sword swinging through the air. The explosion of pain. A spinning room. Rough, strong arms holding me down. Blots in my vision. Howls torn through my throat. That whistling blade, coming down again and again andagain.
And this man standing in front of me, he’s watching it replay right along with me. That haunted shadow in his eyes is cast from the very same shadows, because he was there. He saw every second of it. The two of us were the only ones who were in that room, and the truth is, I’m not sure if either of us will ever truly be able to get out of it.
That’s the thing with trauma to the body—it shows up instantly. In breaks and bruises, in burns and in blood. But the trauma on theinside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.
Finally, within the recesses of those shared shadows, Digby speaks. “You’ve got to have it looked at, my lady.”
No one, save him, would’ve been able to do this. To break down this one wall I have constructed around such a painful piece. It must’ve been keeping my spine upright, because as soon as it comes tumbling down, so do my shoulders. I ache as the bricks of refusal rain down at my feet, showing me exactly the sort of rubbled ruin I truly am. And to think, this is only a single wall.
When I say nothing, Digby gives me a firm look. “It’s got to be done.”
With the debris useless and scattered, I have nothing to hold up my resolve. Not with the recognition of his gaze. So I swallow hard and say, “Okay.”
Because I can’t say no to him. I can’t look him in the eye and sayI’m fine.I could with the others, but not him, not when we were both in that room.
Digby steps aside, deferring to Hojat. “This way, my lady,” the mender tells me.
My numbness comes off in layers as I walk down the hallway. It feels like dead skin peeling away, left in a scattered trail behind me.
By the time I reach the borrowed bedroom I woke up in, I’m already raw. When Hojat covers me with a sheet so I can slip off my shirt, my body starts to tremble. When he has me lie face-down on the bed, my skin breaks out into a cold sweat.
Slade stays at my side, his hand gripping mine, and I squeeze and squeeze, because his touch is the only thing that’s steady against my convulsing rupture, but I also can’t bear for him to see. “Don’t look at them,” I say quietly, my voice a plea.
I don’t know if he already saw, but I can’t stand him looking at it now. Can’t stand for him to see what’s no longer there. At the wounds left behind.
His jaw muscle strains, but he gives a nod, his eyes never leaving mine, never straying down my spine.
I turn my head on the pillow, and there’s Digby, standing guard at the door like he’s done my whole life. Face grim, mouth quiet.
One of these males watches over me, the other sees right through me, no matter where I tell him to look.
“Alright, Lady Auren, I’m starting now,” Hojat says quietly.
I brace myself, but I could never really be ready. The pain is hot and angry, almost bitter at how I’ve tried to ignore it, ready to lash out in punishment.
The first pass of Hojat’s gentle hands as he starts to clean the wounds makes my spine bow up in shocking pain, and I suck in a noisy breath.
Every single swipe of his rag, every trickle of water and the herbal smell that fills my nose, I feel it all with stark alertness. But I feel the phantom pains of what happened in that room, too. The lightning bolts of agony that cut through those pieces of me, leaving me to bleed out onto the floor in golden tatters.
