He took a step, then another, until he was crouching in front of her. She pushed when he wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Don’t,” she begged, when he rested his head on her lap.
He didn’t know the words to make her stop hurting. His entire existence had been an endless void of pain. Her soft sniffles eviscerated him. His fault. Not hers. But he was a selfish bastard and he needed to hold her, no matter how much she wanted him to stop touching her.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he confessed, pulling her fingers to his lips. He kissed her delicate knuckles, her hands.
A soft whimper slipped from her throat, the sound confused and pained. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have?—”
“No. None of this your fault. I’m broken.” He squeezed her hands. “The inside is so much worse than the outside.”
He shifted, settling in to fully rest his head on her lap as he stared to the gaping door.
“I’ve spent my entire life hiding the damaged parts of me, but you…” He still didn’t understand this hold she had over him. “There’s something about you. I thought…maybe… You saw me.”
“I do see you, Jack.” Her fingers threaded through his hair, bringing him back to the way she held him in bed.
He closed his eyes, savoring the unparalleled sensation of having gentle hands on him.
“I’ve seen your scars,” she reminded, stroking her fingers down his scalp to his neck. “I can only imagine what they did to you.”
His eyes opened. “They?”
She hesitated. “R.A.” When he sat up to look at her, she quickly explained, “I saw the burn.”
Jack was back at the estate, body stretched painfully over a chair as the chancellor told him to be still.
He’d known whatever was coming would be bad, but nothing prepared him for the shock. That deep, bite of searing pain that turned his vision white. The jolt of pain that made him buck and scream as heat burned through his flesh burns. Breath snatched from his lungs as his jaw locked. His stomach dropped as his body became a thick, throbbing nerve that swelled in agony. Alive and pulsing. A heartbeat.
A thousand needles punctured his skin as the smell of charred flesh filled his nose like a noxious fume. A cold sweat washed over him, drenching him in humiliating dizziness that left him shaking for hours.
“Look at that,” the chancellor had moaned, proud of his handy work, indifferent to Jack’s tears.
Tight. Swollen. Raised. Wrong. It was a patch of shame he’d never shed, one that lay claim to his body in a way that would follow him home. The chancellor was always with him after that. An echo that never died.
Jack’s finger twisted his ring, his words small and constricted by the little body of a boy he sometimes found himself trapped within. “He was a bad man.”
Her cool fingers trailed slowly over his cheek. She let the statement settle before she asked, “How did he die?”
“Screaming.”
The moment was as seared into his memory as the burn on his hip.
It had taken months for Jack to heal. If not for Myrtle, he would have died. He waited for the papers to announce the passing of Chancellor Rupert Aurin, but no announcement ever came. Then one day, Jack saw him on a television in the window of a pawn shop.
The world stopped. The chancellor was alive. He stood at a podium and wore a black patch over one eye.
Whatever Jack had been doing, wherever he’d been going, it all just fell away.
He rushed back to Myrtle’s flat and ripped back the rug.
“Jack, what are you doing?” She was still in bed, since her work didn’t start for a few hours.
Incapable of explaining, he pulled up the floorboards and began extricating all of his belongings. Stacks of money spilled from the pillowcases, and he stuffed them back inside.
“Jack, stop.” Myrtle’s hands caught his. “Tell me what happened?”
When he tried to speak, only sobs escaped. How was it possible the chancellor was still alive? Jack killed him. He was supposed to be dead. Bad men needed to die, but the chancellor seemed immortal in all his evil.
