“It’s your job to guard me,” I corrected gently, setting a hand on his arm. “Harthon won’t let anyone in through his window, and aslong as you’re here in the hallway, no one will get to me this way. Job, accomplished.” I smiled, seeing the moment he wilted to my logic.
“Fine. But I need to see that it’s him in there before I stay back,” he decided.
I wouldn’t argue with that. If the rat could be anyone, I technically wasn’t safe with any chambermaid, soldier, or worker besides those in the inner circle.
The knob twisted easily in my hand, and I pushed the heavy wood open. The air from the room wafted out, carrying the same masculine scent he’d left in my sheets. At the flash of dark hair, I began to assure Stefano. “See? It’s just hi—”
I stopped as I took in more than Harthon’s hair, shock rendering me speechless. I’d caught him treating a cut high on the back of his leg, his pants lowered to reveal two muscular, tanned globes. He quickly twisted, the front of his pants thankfully lifted higher than the back.
Embarrassment came first, but it was quickly washed away by the burn of horrid recognition.
With his front to me now, I could no longer see it, but I thought…my mind wouldn’t have imagined something like that.
“So eager to say hello that you didn’t knock?” He said it with a playful quirk to his lips, but there was a rigidness in his shoulders.
I forced my throat to work. “You didn’t lock it.”
“Because I wanted easy access to you if another threat arose, and because most people knock,carella.”
But I hadn’t knocked, and I’d caught him with his pants lowered and seen the same image that had haunted my sleep for years.
He has a lot of scars. It’s just a battle wound.
Except battle wounds were jagged or sharp slices, not spiraled shapes.
“Turn around,” I said with a shaking voice.
When he didn’t make a quip about admiring his ass, nausea settled in my stomach. When his smile faded and he dismissed Stefano from the room, something hot and hard sliced through my chest, freezing me in place.
The door closed softly behind me, and he righted his pants, eyes churning with emotion. “I don’t need to turn around. You know what you saw,” he confirmed, and for a moment, I felt as if I was dangling from the tower’s window again.
Harthon, the man I’d trusted, the one who’d kissed me and held me and awoken feelings I never thought I could feel, had the same scar as the man who killed my parents.
“I…you…” I stumbled over impossible thoughts and sharp emotions, incapable of knowing what to say. “Did everyone in the clan have the…the scar?”
I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, that this was reality.
Eying me as one would eye a cornered animal, Harthon slowly took a step forward. “Yes.”
“Were you there?”
He took another step, and I backed up, a flash of fear shooting through me. No—not fear. Even now, I didn’t fear him. It was just a need for space. Still, he kept coming. “I was there.”
Oh, skies.
I bumped into the door behind me, so completely rattled by the visceral pain of betrayal beneath my ribs. “Do you remember it?” I whispered, helpless against his approach.
He stopped one step away from me, pain in his gaze. “Not specifically. They all blend together.”
How ironic that the night that changed the course of my life, the one I dreamed about so often, was nothing but an insignificant blip in his memory.
“When the rest of your people slaughtered villages like mine, did you kill, too?”
“I fought but avoided killing, as much as I could.”
His answer only made this slightly more bearable. If he had eagerly killed my neighbors, been the hand that had stolen their lives, I didn’t know what I would do. Maybe lunge for his knives and try to stab him, take vengeance for what had happened.
Even if you were able, you could never kill him.
