But then he slid his hand from beneath mine and pushed me back.
Something wrenched inside me, but I didn’t fight him.
Awkwardness fell as he cleared his throat. “I feel better.”
I didn’t know if it was from me touching him or if his pulse had calmed far quicker than mine, but I’d already asked far too much of my stress-phobic system to tolerate.
I grew a little dizzy.
Meagre sunlight came through the windows, glinting on a faint scar across his chin. I latched onto it, doing my best to stay upright.
“How did you get that scar?”
His eyebrows shot up. “What?”
I blushed and dropped my gaze. “Sorry, I-I wasn’t studying you. I just...I’m feeling a little unstable and trying to distract myself.”
He didn’t move for the longest time before he cleared his throat and ran his finger over the silvery line. “I think it was from one of the first times the vitalsync core knocked me out. I bashed into a table on the way down.”
My heart fisted that he’d given me a tiny piece of his past. “Was anyone there to patch you up?”
“What do you think?”
I think he’d lived an incredibly lonely, tragically horrible life and even with all the blood staining his hands, I couldn’t find it in me to judge.
“How old were you?”
“Who cares?” He shrugged and broke into a walk. I accepted that was the end of his willingness, but he added quietly, “Ten, eleven? It’s not important. Come. We’ve wasted enough time as it is.”
I followed him, full of pity for the young boy he’d been and the savage man he’d become.
“What do you need me to clean today?”
“You’re not cleaning.”
“I’m not?”
He didn’t reply.
“Where are we going?” I went despite my questions, rather well trained at this point to fulfil his commands.
He didn’t speak until he’d led me into his bedroom and turned to face me. “It’s time for another lesson.”
My stomach dropped. “What lesson?”
Crossing his arms, he ignored me. “Did you bring the knife I gave you?”
My temples throbbed with sharper pain. “No.”
“Where is it?”
“Back in my—” I cut myself off. “In the pavilion Iusedto live in.”
“Ah.” He nodded, both of us remembering the corpses and blood.
I braced myself for him to tell me to go collect it. To step over the bodies and bring back a dagger I had no intention of using, but he merely reached into his back waistband and pulled out the very knife he’d used to kill yesterday.
White noise roared in my ears.
