“Must you repeatedly dodge my questions?”
He laughed. She had him there. “I got them to cover the lighter burns,” he said. “I got them so that every morning when I looked in the mirror I wouldn’t be reminded of what happened to me as a kid.”
But, unfortunately, he’d learnedthe tattoos drew people’s eyes. And when they looked closely, they saw the scars beneath the black ink and asked about them. He didn’t like talking about his past, so he’d taken to covering his arms.
Still, when Emily said haltingly, “What…whathappenedto you?” he found himself spewing the whole sorry story.
“After my dad died, for a while my mum took up with a contemptible prat. Everynight, after she’d come home from the pub pissed, he’d slither into my room to torture me by flicking on his lighter, letting it get nice and hot, and holding it against my arms.”
One of her hands stole up to cover her mouth. “Oh my God, Christian. I can’t even… I don’t know what to say.”
His shrug said,Nothing for you to say.
I’m sorry, her eyes told him.
Again with a shrug.This time it said,Nothing for you to be sorry for either.
“Did you tell your mom what was happening?”
He shook his head. “The man swore he would hurt her like he was hurting me if I told. It wasn’t until about six weeks into the abuse, in a moment of sobriety, that my mum noticed the dried bloodstains on the arms of one of my shirts. She flew into a rage, kicked the guy out of the flat,and then dragged me down to the police station to file a report on the sick, twisted bastard.”
“What happened? Did the police catch him? Did he go to prison?”
Again, Christian shook his head. “While we were at the station, he left town. But not before going back to our flat and nicking our telly. You would think that would have made Mum sober up. But the guilt she felt at not protectingme made her seek the oblivion of the bottle even more.”
“I can’t imagine it.” Emily’s eyes traveled over his arms, searching for the old scars beneath the heavy, midnight swipes of ink. Her voice was thick when she asked, “How could someone do that to a child?”
“What? Stay plastered all day even after realizing that being plastered had resulted in your kid getting tortured? Or sneak intoa little boy’s room to burn him with a lighter?”
“The lighter.” As if she couldn’t help herself, she pressed her fingertip into the indent in his chin. Who knew such an innocent touch could feel so intimate?
“Back then, I thought it was because he was in love with my mum, and he hated that I was a reminder of the man who’d come before him, the manshetruly loved. But over the years I’vecome to realize that some people are just evil. They like inflicting pain for the simple pleasure of it. They fancy watching things weaker and smaller than themselves suffer. He was one of those people.”
After Christian had been decommissioned from the SAS, he had gone looking for that evil man. Good thing he had found the sod already dead and buried, or else he likely would have quietly andbloodily put the bastard in the ground himself. It was on that day, standing next to that headstone, when he had realized he couldn’t be a civilian.
He was too volatile, too barbaric. He needed an outlet for all the violence that bubbled inside him.
A sniffle had his chin jerking back. Huge pools of tears stood in Emily’s eyes.
His heart broke then and there. For one thing, never inhis life did he want to see such pain on the face of the woman he loved. For another thing, Emily didn’t cry pretty tears. She cried like a violent storm breaking loose, and it took everything in him to hang on and weather it.
“Don’t, darling,” he crooned, holding her to him and rocking from side to side. “Please don’t cry.”
“I’m s-sorry,” she sniffled, wiping away the tears that trackeddown her downy cheeks. “I shouldn’t be crying. It’s not my tragedy or trauma. But I keep seeing you as this innocent boy with dark, unruly hair and big, bright eyes, and—”
She shook her head, unable to go on.
He didn’t tell her that his big, bright eyes seemed to have been part of the problem back then. John J. Tully—There! He’d said the name, even if it was only in his mind—had likedto hiss, his breath stinking of rot from his decaying teeth, “Stop starin’ at me with those spooky eyes, you daft little bastard!” as he burned a new scar on Christian’s arm.
Her fingers delicately traced over his bicep, stopping when they encountered one of the puckered patches of scar tissue. Then her hand drifted lower, her fingertips finding the burn on the inside of his forearm.
Most of his scars were faint, only discernible if you knew what you were looking for. But the one on the inside of his forearm? That was a different story. The skin had been thinner there, and John Tully had been particularly brutal. That scar was hard, knotted, extra sensitive.
He hissed when she smoothed her thumb over it.
“Does it still hurt?” She blinked.
“It feels raw, like thenerves are exposed,” he explained.
