Page 42 of Breaking His Exile

Finally he grumbled something under his breath and stripped off the jacket. Hung it on the hook. Pulled his shirt over his head, and she saw the full canvas of him for the first time: the five skulls on his chest, the names and dates beneath each one, the scattered scars from combat and the deliberate ones from his own hand. He was lean, wiry, every muscle defined by work and deprivation.

He dropped his shirt and stood before her with his arms at his sides like a man awaiting sentence.

Well, he was going to be disappointed. She was the last person to judge him or anyone else.

She pointed to the chair. “Sit.”

He sat. The wood creaked under his weight. She found the first aid kit in the cabinet above the stove—basic, military-issue, with QuikClot gauze and antiseptic and not much else. She filled a basin with warm water from the kettle, gathered clean rags, and pulled the chair around so she faced him directly.

The new burns ran in a line along his left forearm, six of them. The skin around them was red, inflamed, and she could smell the singed flesh beneath the rain-and-pine scent of him.

“This will hurt,” she said.

“I know.”

She cleaned them methodically, just as she’d learned to clean her own wounds years ago. Warm water, gentle pressure, wiping away the char and the blood. He didn’t flinch. His eyes stayed on her face, watching, unreadable.

She found antibiotic ointment, smeared it thin across each burn, then wrapped gauze around his forearm and secured it with medical tape. His skin was warm beneath her fingers, the hair on his arm coarse.

When she finished, she kept hold of his hand. “Why pain?”

His throat worked. “It makes everything quiet.”

“Quiet how?”

“Everything else gets... smaller.” He stared at the stove, not at her. “The wanting. The remembering. The part of me that starts believing tomorrow might be different. Pain narrows it to one point. One thing I can control.”

She nodded. She got that. Music did the same thing for her. She rubbed her thumb over the back of his hand. “The next time you need it quiet, tell me.”

His gaze snapped to her face. “So you can stop me?”

“No.” She lifted his bandaged forearm and pressed her lips to the gauze. “So you don’t have to be alone.”

“Rainey.” His voice was rough, stripped to nothing. “You should be more afraid of me.”

She set his arm down gently. “I’m not.”

“You don’t understand what I⁠—”

“I understand exactly what you are.” She stood, gathering the basin, the rags, putting distance between them so she could think. “You’re a man who thinks his own suffering keeps the rest of us safe. Who believes if he hurts himself enough, he can prevent the next disaster. Who’d rather burn his own skin than risk wanting something good.”

She dumped the water into the utility sink by the stove, then turned back to find him still sitting, his bandaged arm resting on his thigh, his bare chest rising and falling with ragged breaths that looked almost painful.

He stood so fast the chair scraped backward. He crossed to the window, his back to her. Outside, the rain had slowed to a steady drizzle, the clouds breaking in ragged strips to show patches of lighter gray.

“I killed a man for you. In a bar full of witnesses. I took you into the mountains with no plan, no backup, no guarantee I could keep you safe. That’s not protection, Rainey. That’s compulsion. That’s the same overconfidence that got my team killed, and I’m doing it again right now, with you, and I can’t fucking stop.”

She wasn’t getting through to him. His mind was made up, and he’d been living in exile for years because of it. And maybe it was foolish to try, but she had to.

“I know how much it hurts. The cigarettes. My father used to burn me with them.”

He froze, turning slowly to face her.

“He. Did. What?”

She pulled up her sleeve and showed her the burns hidden among her tattoos. “He told me it was because I talked too loud, moved too fast, took up too much space. He said he was teaching me to be smaller, safer, more careful. He said he was protecting me from myself. So I learned to make myself small. To read a room before entering it. To know which floorboards wouldn’t talk, which locks he couldn’t get through. I wrote songs about it. I ran from it. And I swore I’d never let another man decide what I could handle or what I deserved.”

She reached out, tentative, and touched his shoulder. The muscle beneath her palm was iron, trembling.