“I will heal,” he said as my gaze fell toward the bulge of a bandage puffing beneath his pants, at his calf. “I always do.”
“How many fights have there been?” I reached for him, and he looked surprised, but he let me trace a thick scar curling around his forearm toward his wrist.
“Fifteen. They gave me a break after that one, remember?” he said with a glance at the scar. “It required tears of the phoenix, and even then took a week to heal.”
“What did this?” I couldn’t look away from the scar. That injury might have meant amputation for any human.
Gallagher looked puzzled. “You don’t remember?”
My eyes watered again, and his scars blurred. His injuries and my memory loss were each terrifying on their own, but taken together, with absolutely no context, they were overwhelming. “There’ve been so many. And all because of me.”
“No.” He folded his arms over a broad chest marred by dozens of new marks. He was born into a warrior race, but this was not how he was meant to fight. This was notwhyhe was meant to fight. “Because of Vandekamp,” he insisted. “This is not your fault, Delilah. I put myself here.”
“For me.” I didn’t know what else to say.
I couldn’t absorb it all. I couldn’t think.
“Your hair.” I said the first thing that popped into my mind as I sat down and wiped unspilled tears from my eyes. “It grew back.” Too late, I realized that I shouldn’t have been surprised by that.
Gallagher lifted his cap from his head and ran one hand over his dark hair. “Yes. I suppose you haven’t seen it up close in a while.”
I tried to hide my surprise. “How long has it been?”
“I’m not sure. A couple of months?”
My eyes widened, and he noticed. “Since your first fight?”
“No. Since the night of my second. You don’t remember?” He studied my face, and his concern set off alarms deep inside me. “What’s going on, Delilah?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Why are you lying to me?” His voice held no accusation, but guilt flooded me anyway. He had to tell me the truth, and he deserved the same from me. But if he found out someone had taken my memory, he wouldn’t stop fighting until he knew what had happened to me and who had done it. Until the guilty party was dead.
Or untilhewas dead.
I couldn’t let that happen, but short of a lie, I had no good answer. “I...”
“You don’t remember the last time we were in the same room?” There was something strange in his voice. Some odd mixture of disparate emotions. Concern and...relief? Or was I imagining that? “What happened, Delilah? How much time are you missing?”
I blinked up at him, surprised by a conclusion I probably should have expected. He knew me better than anyone in the world, since my mother had died, and redcaps were experts at interpreting things left unsaid. They had to be.
Still... “How did you know?”
He almost answered. I saw the impulse in his eyes. In the automatic opening of his mouth, as if he were about to speak. Then he thought better of it.
Though thefaecouldn’t tell an outright lie, their methods of avoiding the truth ranged from simple omission of key details to the intentionally misleading delivery of information. The conscious decision not to tell me whatever he’d been about to say meant something. Something important.
“What aren’t you telling me, Gallagher?”
“What aren’tyoutellingme?” he demanded. “You don’t remember the night of my second fight. You don’t know what happened to my arm. You’re surprised by the length of my hair. What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Falling asleep in your room the night of your first fight. You were newly bald, and they’d just used me to make you kill Argos, the hellhound.”
“That’s it?” His brows furrowed low over gray eyes. “There’s nothing else?”
“Nothing until I woke up this morning in a private cell. My new guard seems to know me. And evidently serving in the arena is my regular gig.”
“You’ve been at every one of my fights,” Gallagher confirmed. “But they haven’t let me speak to you in weeks.”
