“Zemër, you’re already touching me,” he drawled lazily, but something was off. There was an undertone of tension in his voice.
My hands kept moving over him, exploring: his shoulders, the firm planes of his chest, the ridges of muscle beneath my palms. When I reached around his waist and traced my fingertips across his back, my breath caught. Beneath the warmth of his skin were hard lines, uneven and raised.
“What’s that?” I asked, already shifting behind him, needing to see.
A soft gasp escaped me. His back was a canvas of ink—an enormous tattoo stretching from shoulder to shoulder, a skull formed of countless faces, wreathed in smoke and fire and bleeding into shadows. It was haunting and beautiful in a terrible way.
“Whoa,” I breathed, my fingers skimming over the taut, puckered skin. And then I felt them clearly. They were deep scars, burned into his flesh and healed into something permanent.
My chest tightened as understanding sank in. My throat closed.
Those weren’t abstract shapes. They were faces. Twisted in pain. Hollow with nothing left. Some so vivid they made my stomach turn.
I stilled before I moved around to face him and reached up, sliding his sunglasses from his face. His expression was carved from stone.
“Who did this to you?” I asked softly, the question trembling with more than curiosity. It was grief, anger, the sudden, unbearable ache of knowing someone had hurt him this deeply.
“My father.” The words landed like a blow and my eyes widened. “It was a long time ago.”
As if time could dull something like that.
“What happened?” I whispered. Not that there was a single explanation that could justify this. “Why?”
Silence stretched between us, and while he didn’t look away, something in him withdrew. When he finally spoke, his voice was stripped of emotion, and that frightened me more than anger ever could.
“My father liked to hurt those he deemed weaker than him,” he said flatly. “I didn’t.”
The air left my lungs in a sharp exhale. Nausea curled in my stomach. His father. His own father. The man who was supposed to protect him and love him.
Rage surged so fast it made my hands tremble. To hell with my doctor’s oath, to hell with reason—if that man were standing in front of me, I wasn’t sure I would be able to resist tearing him apart with my bare hands.
No one had the right to do that to Kian. No one.
I leaned forward, wrapping my arms around him. “If I ever see him, I’m going to kill him.”
“He’s dead.” His gaze filled with contempt and his voice turned acidic. “I killed him.”
I didn’t know if he expected me to judge him, but I didn’t. Maybe it took this man—the pieces of his story he was slowly revealing—for me to realize that some men deserved to die.
“Good.” I brushed my fingers over his back, keeping my touch light. His muscles tensed, but he didn’t pull away. Instead, he leaned into my touch. “And where was your mother?”
I hated that there was accusation in my voice, but dammit, she should have protected him.
“She ran off—left him—when I was young. She wanted to take me with her, but she couldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“It would have caused a full-blown war between the cartel and the Albanian mafia.”
“You’re worth it,” I argued. “I would have never left you behind. Better to stay and be there for your son than be safe without your son.”
He smiled bitterly.
“She would have died if she stayed. It hurt her to leave me behind, but it was necessary. Besides, I survived.”
I chewed my lip. My instinct was telling me he cared for his mom, but I still couldn’t understand how she could leave him behind.
“Your tattoo,” I started slowly, my voice almost lost beneath the rhythmic crash of the waves and the sharp cries of seagulls overhead. Salt stung my nostrils and the wind tugged at my hair. “Does it mean anything?”
