Page 124 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
His expression changes instantly. Shock first. Then horror.
“To add your tally to the roster,” I whisper. “One line for getting the damaged one.”
Something in him snaps at that.
He moves around me so quickly that he blocks my view of the mirror entirely, cutting me off from my own reflection as if he cannot bear to let me look at myself while I say things likethat. He tears the blade from my hand so hard I know it cuts him too, because fresh blood spills immediately across his palm. He doesn’t react to it at all. His whole body is fixed on the shallow cut on my arm.
He catches my forearm carefully, almost reverently, pressing his hand over the blood.
“The men,” he starts. His voice is shaking now, really shaking. “The men your mother brought around you…”
“Debt,” I whisper.
The word tastes rotten.
“Each scar…” My throat closes around it. I force it out anyway. “Like a name in a guest book.”
The second I say it, his entire face changes.
I have seen Silas angry. I have seen him jealous, violent, hungry…even cut open with grief. This is something else. This is fury so deep it looks holy. Not the kind that wants to break something because it is easier than feeling. The kind that wants to go backward in time and slaughter everyone who ever made me think of myself this way.
His hand stays over the cut on my arm. The bleeding is already slowing, but he keeps it there like he’s trying to stop something bigger than blood.
“You didn’t mean what you said,” I whisper, because I have to hurt myself with it before he can. “Kadin is right about one thing. I am damaged. Inside and out.”
Silas shakes his head before I even finish.
Not slowly. Not thoughtfully. Immediately. Violently. As if the words themselves offend him.
When he speaks, his voice comes out unsteady in a way I almost never hear from him.
“Don’t you dare,” he says, the force of it rooting me where I stand. His voice is rough, furious, full of a kind of devotion thatfeels almost violent in its certainty. “Don’t you dare let him use your pain to tell you what you are.”
Reaching for the hem of his shirt, he pulls it over his head in one sharp, impatient motion, the fabric dropping from his body.
Even though I know this body, even though I have touched these scars with my own hands and mouth while learning them in the dark, the sight of him like this still steals the breath from me.
I know what he carries.
But knowing is not the same thing as seeing him offer it up like this.
Not as seduction. Not as vulnerability for its own sake. As evidence. As truth. As if he is laying his whole body bare in front of me and saying, look at what was done to me and tell me again that damage is all we are.
The cigarette burns hide beneath the trees on his arms. Cuts cross his chest and stomach, some pale and silvered with age, some thicker and uglier, each one a line in a language I understand too well now. His own guest book. His own roster. His own body turned into something a man used to leave his name behind on.
Staring at him, I feel my whole chest cave inward.
“My father,” he whispers. There is no poetry in it, no distance, no attempt to make it easier to hear. “That’s what he made me. A thing to burn. A thing to cut. A place to put his rage when it got too heavy to hold inside himself.”
Taking one step closer, his hands are trembling.
“The burns on my arms,” he says. “The cuts on my body. Every mark he left because he needed something weaker than him to make him feel like a man.”
My eyes sting harder. I can’t look away from him.
He is beautiful, ruined, furious...human in a way that hurts to witness.
“If the world wants to hurt the damaged,” he says, voice breaking at the edges, “then cut me.”
