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“Hardly,” she said with a nudge of her elbow.

“Sometimes I feel it,” he said, rubbing at the still-new scar tissue over the slash he’d gotten in Constantinople.

“Do I want to know the story behind that one?” she asked.

“Probably not.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not anymore,” he said.

“And the man who gave it to you?”

“Got the worse end of the fight,” he said. In truth, he didn’t know what had happened to the man, but the extent of the wounds the Russian agent had suffered made him doubtful his foe would’ve survived.

“Does it ever become easier?” she asked.

He shut his eyes for a moment, letting the wash of casualties—some whose names he knew and others who were simply anonymous enemies—spill over him.

“No.”

He paused, wondering how much he wanted to share with her. By telling her more, he risked letting her wedge her toe into the gap of the iron-banded door behind which he hid the deepest parts of himself, but holding back felt wrong. Even after all of the heartbreak she’d caused, he still felt compelled to spill every one of his secrets to her the way he once had.

“I told you this is my last mission for the War Office,” he said. “After we stop Wark’s plot, I’ll be finished.”

“You were serious about no longer sailing?” she asked.

“Yes.”

The fingers that had been stroking over his chest in wide, lazy circles stilled. “Andrew Colter, no longer a man of the sea. It’s been so long since you were just a boy gazing out at the horizon.”

“I’ve seen enough,” he said, pushing a hand through his hair.

“How did you start with the War Office?” she asked.

“After I came back to Eyemouth and found out you were married, there was nothing keeping me in Scotland. I traveled to Liverpool and signed on as first mate for a ship sailing to New Orleans. The day before we were due out of port, I was pulled off the ship and marched into a hotel. A man named Admiral Perry and another named Rickman told me my travels made me an ideal man for some work that needed doing.”

He must’ve shuddered at the memory, because she quietly asked, “What happened?”

“I was meant to pass a message to an agent working in New Orleans, but a French agent intercepted me.” He rolled onto his side slightly and pointed at a raised white scar that ran over the ribs on his right side. “He dealt me that.”

He watched as she traced over the scar through the air as though she didn’t dare touch it. “That one truly doesn’t hurt any longer,” he said with a chuckle.

“But it hurt at the time,” she said.

“Exactly as much as you think a dagger in the side would.”

“What about this one?” she asked, pointing to a puckered scar.

“I was shot by an agent for the Orange Free State in Cape Town. I was fortunate that the bullet went clean through my shoulder.”

“And where did you get this?” she asked, picking up his left hand and turning it in the light to see the ragged cut along the back of it.

He flexed his fingers, the skin there still tight. “Slashed with a knife in Indonesia. That was just poor luck. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“You’ve been injured so many times,” she said.

And yet none of them hurt as much as what she’d done to him.