Page 128 of Beautiful Prey

“Anything. Seconds. Breaths. How long until it stopped.”

For a moment, all I hear is water. “Sometimes.”

His mouth finds the next scar. Fourteen.

“Onyx used to count the seconds between blasts when we were little,” he says against my back. “He thought if he knew when the next one was coming, it couldn’t scare him.”

“Did it work?”

“No, but he’d look at me every time, so I counted with him anyway. Gave him something to listen to besides the noise.”

Something tightens beneath my ribs as his lips find the next one. Seventeen.

“Someone should’ve done that for you.”

“Don’t.”

“All right.” His hand moves slowly over my side. “I won’t make you talk about it. But I’m not going to pretend I don’t see it either.”

“Just don’t make me look at you.”

“I won’t.”

And he doesn’t. His mouth settles over the last scar instead, staying there long enough that I have to close my eyes.

“I know these are yours.” His thumb passes carefully across the wet skin. “I’m not trying to take that from you. But you’re my husband now, and if whoever did this ever comes back, they don’t get you alone. Not anymore.”

I don’t answer him. There isn’t a sentence anywhere in me that goes with what he just said, and I look for one longer than I’d like to admit.

Every hand that ever touched these scars was holding the thing that made them. Dad’s, putting them there like corrections. Mine, in the dark, checking they’d healed enough to hide. Nobody has ever put their mouth to one.

And here’s the thing about Dad. He taught me that softness is a debt somebody calls in later. He was right often enough that I stopped questioning it, until now, with this miner standing behind me, kissing the worst of what he did and asking nothing back.

One day I’m going to take everything from that man. Slowly. I’ll let him watch it go the way he let me watch the strap come down, patient, certain, no part of it rushed. And when there’s nothing left of him, I’ll still have this. This exact thing he could never make and never break.

Ryven would fight for me. Seren would bury the body afterwards. But they’ve stood beside me since we were seven. Loving me costs them nothing because it’s been built into us for most of our lives.

Jade came from a world where everything costs something. He spent years carrying his brother, counting medicine, stretching food and waiting for the price hidden underneath every kindness, and somehow he’s standing here giving me one anyway.

Somebody taught him to expect the bill.

“Who taught you that?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the tile in front of me.

His hands stop against my sides. “Taught me what?”

“That somebody always wants something back. Who taught you that kindness comes with a price?”

He goes still behind me. For a long moment there’s only the water.

“Men,” he whispers. “Before the Hunt. Sometimes Onyx needed medicine and I didn’t have enough for it. There were men who did. They knew what I needed, and I knew what they wanted. So I paid them another way. I never told anyone that.”

My hands curl against the tile, rage coming up so fast I taste it. I want every name, every face, every motherfucker who ever put his hands on him because he was desperate enough to let them. There will come a day when I go back to Calder, and Light help them when I do.

But none of that comes out, because there isn’t a version of sorry that doesn’t sound like pity, and pity is the one thing I refuse to give him. The one thing he’d refuse to take.

So I turn around and put my mouth against his forehead.

“Nobody gets to buy you again. Not your body. Not your choices. Nothing. And you never owe me for taking care of you.”