Page 52 of Ruthless Scar
“You’ve been reading it for ten minutes. Either it’s riveting or you’re somewhere else.” Still staring at the screen. “I’m going with option two.”
I turn the page. She’s not wrong. The surveillance data is Nico’s. Clean. Thorough. But my eyes keep pulling away from it. Toward her. The shirt collar slipping off her shoulder. Bare skin.
I force my eyes back to the report.
My sleeve catches on the edge of the desk when I reach for the next file. The fabric rides up past my forearm. Scar tissue. Three lines, tight and silver, running from wrist to elbow. Training marks. The kind earned by a boy who learned to fight men who carried blades.
Her typing stops.
I pull the sleeve down.
“How many?” Her voice is different. Quiet. The sarcasm stripped out.
“Does it matter?”
“Humor me.” She turns her chair to face me. “I’m a data person. I like counting things.”
I don’t answer.
Her eyes are on my forearm where the fabric bunched. “Can I see?”
A question. Not a demand. Space for me to say no.
I push the sleeve up. The three on my forearm first. Then higher, past the elbow, where two more cross the bicep. Different angles. Different years.
She’s out of her chair. Standing beside me. Her shampoo and the coffee on her breath. Her finger touches the lowest scar.
My body locks. Not from pain. The opposite. Every nerve from shoulder to fingertip fires at once, a circuit dead for years coming back online without warning.
Cazzo.
I go rigid. My fists close on the armrests.
“This one?” she says.
“Knife.” Flat. Controlled. Everything else is not.
Her finger moves up. Traces the second line. Lighter. Older.
“This one?”
“Knife.”
“Creative.” She moves to the third. “Let me guess.”
“Knife.”
“You have a knife problem.”
“I had a training problem. The knives were secondary.”
Her finger reaches the bicep. She pushes my sleeve higher, exposing ink and scar tissue tangled together. The Sicilian patterns my artist worked around the raised skin, incorporating damage into design.
“This one’s different.”
Blade gouge. Wider than the others. She runs her finger along it and every nerve fires white. No one has touched me like this since before her. The sensation is so sharp it hits like being flayed open.
“Knife fight,” I say.
