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SIXTEEN
Decima
The fur rugbeneath me was thick enough to insulate my body from the hard floor, and lying pressed into Blaze’s body gave me all the warmth I needed to sleep through the night. When I did wake, it was to his fingers running down my back, back up it, around my shoulder, and then taking a similar path downward again. His touch brought shivers to my skin as I burrowed deeper into his natural heat.
The other men stirred around us. I didn’t open my eyes to see who had ended up where. In the aftermath of our intense collision last night, we’d all dozed off where we lay.
Blaze’s fingers crested my shoulder, tracing a smoothly curved line I knew cut across the skin there. When their motion paused, I opened my eyes to peer blearily at him.
He was studying the scar. “Where did you get this one?” he whispered.
I cleared the sleepiness from my throat before speaking, my voice still rough. “It was a torture attempt. The woman who momentarily restrained me managed to make that cut and break my pinky before I slipped my bindings.”
“You’ve been tortured?” Garrison asked from behind. I peeked over my shoulder and found him sitting on the floor, leaning against the sofa with one leg extended and the other bent upright.
I wanted to laugh at the question. He’d seen the scars across my body, and he knew my history. It would have been more surprising if I hadn’t been tortured at some point.
“Once or twice,” I said with a shrug.
“Who did it?” Talon’s deep voice echoed across the room. The ferocity in his tone held a clear threat, maybe one that would have unnerved someone else. But I wasn’t that person. It warmed me to realize he’d have wanted to unleash that ferocity on my former tormenter.
“I don’t know, but she’s long dead now,” I reassured him.
Blaze dragged his finger across another scar at the base of my back, a smaller but jagged line. “This one?”
Pursing my lips, I sorted through my memories. “An accident. I jumped through a window and didn’t stick the landing. It was from the glass.”
I knew the one that he’d eventually ask about—the most prominent of all of them. But he surprised me as he gripped my right hand and opened it, revealing the thin mark that spread across each of my fingers in a straight line. He didn’t even need to ask as he ran his thumb across it and met my eyes in a silent question.
I didn’t want to delve into that scar. It was more difficult than explaining the ones I’d obtained from missions. The missions didn’t matter, and those people and places were a blip on my radar. Scars like the one across my hand—like the one beside my belly button—meant something different. They’d been given to me because of my failures and mistakes.
“Noelle,” I admitted, clenching my fist as I thought about her. I broke away from Blaze’s eye contact. “I wasn’t doing as well using my left side as she’d hoped, so she made sure that my left side had to be my strongest one for a while.”
“She did this to you?” Blaze asked, and I didn’t have to look up to know that he was giving an utterly horrified expression. “She broke your hand, on purpose?”
“I hardly remember it. I was so young,” I said, as if that made the situation better.
I wasn’t lying. I remembered only the crunch when she slammed the edge of a cutting board into my fingers with all the might she could muster, claiming that I’d one day thank her for being a stronger fighter. And it had made me a stronger fighter, after all. I’d never had a difficult time using my left side after the weeks when it’d been my only option.
I hadn’t realized how consuming the silence was in the room until Julius finally spoke. “And the one on your stomach?”
I hadn’t meant to upset them so early in the morning, but I could hear in Julius’s voice how angry the thought of Noelle hurting me made him. It wasn’t as if there was anything left to avenge now. She was gone, dead at their hands.
But of course, we still didn’t know who’d hired her to train me so viciously.
I sighed. “It was another training mishap.”
“I wouldn’t consider having your fingers intentionally broken as a child to be a training ‘mishap,’ but please, continue,” Garrison said, his usual snarky tone harshened by his own obvious anger—anger I knew wasn’t aimed at me but my former captors.
I rolled to my back, tilting my head until I could see all of them. Julius had sprawled across the sofa, and Talon sat half upright at the other end. Garrison was the only other of my men on the floor.
They all watched me intently. Waiting for the story I didn’t really want to tell.
I flattened my voice so it’d be as even as possible. “This one really was an accident. Noelle left me alone with a trainer who specialized in weapons, and he was teaching me the basics of the different styles of throwing knives. We got to the part of the lesson where I needed to learn to dodge the knives, and Noelle came barging into the room and distracted me. I didn’t dodge one.”
I took a deep breath, thinking back to the look of horror on the weapons trainer’s face. “They were practice knives, not fully sharpened ones, so it didn’t go too far into me, but it lodged itself far enough that I needed stitches. And then I pulled the stitches twice during training in the following weeks, so that’s why the scar is still so big.”
What I didn’t want to say was that I wasn’t totally sure any more that it’d been an accident after all. Noelle had liked to surprise me to test my reflexes and instincts. Maybe she’d distracted me on purpose to see how well I’d dodge then. A ten-year-old kid in the middle of having knives thrown at her.
