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Our last sparring match had been one of those times, the nagging sensation of pins and needles making it hard for me to focusandperform. I was no quitter though, so I’d been giving the exercise everything I had.

Until Alicia got me with a jab dead in the middle of the problematic spot.

I’d passed out from the pain.

I was here now though, and ready to give it another shot—with Alicia’s assurance that she would avoid hitting me there again.

“So talk to me about Isaiah,” she said, moving into a fighting stance, and waiting for me to join.

Oh.

She was hitting mehereinstead.

“What makes you think there’s something to talk about?” I asked as I moved to face her.

“The fact that you haven’t fussed at me for hiring him,” she smirked. “Nothing I found in his history—or from what he told me—suggested that the two of you might know each other. And yet… clearly you do.”

I raised an eyebrow, dropping my hands to my sides. “Clearly? That’s a reach.”

“But is it wrong?”

I cast my gaze up to the ceiling, cursing myself for taking what should have been obvious bait. “No.”

“Thought so. Okay,” she mused, sauntering up to where I stood. “If you hated him, you would’ve been in my face about it as soon as you found out, so it’s something else then. What was it? A fling or something?”

“There was nofling. It was… a crush.”

Alicia’s raised eyebrow said a lot more about her disbelief than her mouth did. But that really was the way the story had gone.

I was an overzealous teenager, with an inappropriate obsession with the Thorn tasked to protect me.

Reciprocated feelings?

Of course not.

That wasn’t the Thorn—or Rose—way.

This was my sister though. And the whole thing with Zay had happened nearly a decade ago. And the Garden didn’t exist anymore.

It wasn’t like telling the truth would get us in “trouble”.

But… getting “in trouble” wasn’t the only consideration here. I didn’t particularly care to dredge up painful memories of having and then abruptly, brutally, losing something that had felt so incredibly sacred.

“So… you were in love with him?” Alicia correctly surmised. There was no flippancy in her tone—no minimalization. “How long ago?”

I shook my head, finallyreallyreturning my gaze to hers. I’d been avoiding her eyes, but I met them now, knowing there was no getting around this conversation. “A decade, probably. We were kids.Iwas a kid. He was a little older.”

“When you say kids…?”

“Pen’s age,” I clarified, referring to another rescued Rose. “I was seventeen. He’d just gotten his mark, so… nineteen. Maybe twenty.”

“Too old for you.”

I rolled my eyes. “In a normal world, probably. Nothing ever happened anyway.”

“You were in love with him though.”

“Nothingphysicalhappened, I mean. We… couldn’t have. And he wouldn’t have.”

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