“Nash, you didn’t fuck anything up.”
Then why did you run away from me?
He wanted to run now. I felt it in the air. Inhimas his gaze darted to the door behind me.
I took a chance and reached for him again. “Who else knows?”
About the scars.
Locke zeroed in on my fingers as I wrapped them around his wrists. His sigh was barely audible, but I felt it everywhere. “Knows they exist? Or where they came from?”
“Either. Both.Neither. You don’t have to tell me shit.”
A pause stretched out. I weathered it by counting his steady heartbeat. Losing track and starting again.
“Folk knows everything,” he said eventually. “Ranger too. He was there for most of it.”
“No one else? Not Logan?”
Locke made a low sound that broke my damn heart. “I’ve spent a lifetime hiding shit from him, but it’s harder these days. He sniffed me out last summer. Let me lie to his face about it. You know it’s the things you think will save you that hurt you the most?”
Not in the same way he did. No one had hurt me the way someone had hurt him. “How far down do they go?”
Locke shrugged. “See for yourself.”
“What?”
He unbuckled his belt and popped the button at his waist, a humourless challenge in his eyes. A silent dare that was all pain and no fun.
Like waking up naked in bed with him, it was the worst reason in the world for tugging him away from the sink and shoving his jeans down. For discovering that he wore no fucking underwear, leaving me nowhere to hide from the horror show that stretched from the base of his spine to the backs of his knees.
The thick, raised scars that were a thousand times worse than the gnarly burn on Saint’s chest, an injury I still couldn’t look at without breaking down.
Like I’d feared, they varied in age. Some clearly years old, others as young as our friendship.
One was the worst thing I’d ever seen, and I fought the urge to check his abdomen to erase the messed-up image of it cutting so deep it came out the other side.
“Who?”
The word was a growl from somewhere inside me I’d never been.
Locke sighed. “Easy. It’s over now.”
Because he was here. With us. But with scars like that, it was never over. It was Saint flinching when the smoke from the firepits blew into his face. It was the grief in Rubi’s eyes when he traced the white lines on River’s wrists.
It was the pain that never left us.
“Do they hurt?”
Locke put himself back together. “Sometimes. But it goes away if I take a nap.”
“That’s why you fall asleep in weird places?”
“No.”
His answer seemed final.
I took a shaky breath, but he spoke again before I could.
