Page 93 of Inflict

As though he should already know.

Connor wasn’t sure that he did.

“It’s a pretty sad state of a home, isn’t it?” Connor asked. “I’m not sure it even feels like that to me.”

“You’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to it,” she replied.

He didn’t miss her choice of words.

Him, not the place.

“How long has this been bleeding?” Evelyn asked.

“An hour or so,” he answered. “It’s fine, it’ll staunch. It’s not the first time it has happened.”

Evelyn frowned, glancing back over her shoulder, back the way she had come. Connor didn’t have to follow her gaze to know what she was looking for, or rather, what she was seeing. His knife, still bloodied, sitting on the edge of the sink. An unrolled mess of gauze on the floor. Blood drops needing cleaned.

Chaos.

A desperate truth.

It was a beautiful lie, too.

He still didn’t feel any better.

Silently, Evelyn lifted his other hand, and flipped his palm up. Her thumb traced over the carved shamrock there with slow strokes, again and again.

“How often?” she asked.

That one was easy. “Not often at all.”

Still, her thumb moved over the shamrock again. “But often enough.”

She was calling him on his lie, the same one he told himself over and over again. That he focused the urge elsewhere, that he had it under control. If that were the case, the scarred ridges of the shamrocks in his palms would not be so large, with so many distinct lines.

“Not often at all,” Connor repeated.

“Still enough,” she whispered.

“It was an easy way to deal with everything when I was young.” He avoided her searching gaze, if only because he might not like the pity staring back at him. He was cowardly in that way. Desperate for relief, even if that meant hurting himself, yet ashamed of the reaction it might draw in others because of it. “I thought it was interesting, how different tools could make such different lines, how thin blades could make the deepest cuts. It only got more involved—worse—the older I got. It’s a hard thing to hide, though nobody really pointed it out on purpose.”

“But you knew that they knew,” she pressed.

Connor shrugged. “I didn’t want to feel so crazy all the time. I thought if I hid them in a more permanent way, then it would go away altogether. If I couldn’t see it, then it didn’t exist.”

Her fingers traveled up his palm, to the inside of his wrist, over the ink there, and then further up his arm, over the tail of a falling phoenix. She had admired his tattoos before—many times—but he knew, just the way her fingers slowed on certain pieces, how they stroked back and forth to check again, that she was finding things she hadn’t before.

Hidden secrets.

Covered scars.

“It always pissed me off whenever someone would toss my drawings and scribbles into the rubbish bin, like they weren’t important,” he admitted. “I couldn’t do that, no matter how awful or terrible they were.”

“You won’t ruin art,” she said, filling in the blank he left open.

“Not if I can help it. And it did help, for a while.”

Evelyn’s fingers came back down to his palm, pressing into the shamrock. “Except it didn’t.”