AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She frowned. “You would want that? Me to leave a scar on you?”
“Hmm.” He grunted his acquiescence and flicked her a half smile.
She smiled but frowned at the same time, and shook her head. “I couldn’t do that to you. I wouldn’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to mark you.” She grazed her nails down his stomach lightly. They caught a little on the scars and dragged, and he liked it. He wobbled dangerously on edge for a moment. She did the same again higher up, on his pectorals, catching his nipple, which hardened instantly. She ran a finger over his faded crying Mary burnt on brand. He wanted her to cut it off and replace it with a mark of her own. Her on him. Forever.
“Heart,” he ground out. He wanted one there. Over his burnt on brand. Over his heart. He wanted her there, in his heart.
She lifted her gaze from his body to his eyes. “Leave a scar on your heart? I believe I already have, Phantom.”
Fuck, she was right. He felt it seared inside him. Deep, deep within his heart. “Hmm.” He let her continue her silent grazing of his body, his arms, his thighs, her nails scraping deliciously as he burned up for her.
* * *
“Tell me, Eli,”she whispered eventually, her lips now cool against his skin from the ice cream.
He sighed.
“It’s not your fault, you know?” she asked.
He looked at her, loving that she was trying. She wouldn’t fully reach him, but he knew that she’d keep trying, and he loved her for that. She’d fight and fight all the way by his side.
“Neither you nor I can change what happened, I know that,” she said.
“Hmm,” he breathed out, patiently listening.
“You can change the consequences though. You don’t need to have the hurt leaving marks on your skin.”
He blinked at her. No one had ever challenged him. Not even Colt and the MC. They let him cope as he knew how. When he killed, he cut, simple as that, one meant the other, they were inextricably linked. Weren’t they? He blinked. He’d never really thought about it, that they could be unchained, that one wouldn’t need to be followed with the other.
“Hmm.”
“I want to hear the stories, a reason-”
She was licking the most recent scar. A short but angry looking one. He knew she wouldn’t stop, not tonight. He found he wanted to give her some ground. He was tired of being lonely. She was offering to stand beside him and, goddammit it, he wanted her there. He took a breath.
“Hernandez,” he rasped.
She looked up, then back at the scar. She then brought her finger up to it and ran it over the scar. “Hernandez? Gil Hernandez? My cousin?” she asked quietly.
Phantom did his signature slow blink of agreement, and his grunt, “Hmm.”
“A name… people’s names?” Her eyes flickered back to his body. Taking in the number of marks. He didn’t hold the number in his head. He didn’t glorify each kill. He wasn’t proud, or ashamed. They were just a part of him, like his arms and legs.
She took a breath, and with great inner strength and control, calmly said, “It’s wrong to kill, Phantom, you know that, don’t you?”
He bit his lip. “Hmm.” He knew it. Theoretically. The practicality was quite different.
“Name them all,” she challenged.
So he did. Each one she licked, he named. Some he only knew a surname, or a nickname. She was working backwards, working through the most recent. The messy patch of angry slashes. That was the whole of the SoCal Demonios. He thought he had killed them all. In a blood thirsty rage he couldn’t remember. He had hated himself for it. That was not his style, he was cold and meticulous. But, he hadn’t killed them like that, after all. They’d died in the gas, and he had made it out. Then she worked her way through the neat little tally lines. His life’s work, in bringing death to others. Not out of choice, but because he had no other path to take. He named them all as best as he could.
And then she got to the first 2 tally lines. The neatest, the smallest, the most faded. But the heaviest, for Phantom.
He took a deep breath. And named the final two.
“Dad. Mom.”
Yes, his greatest shame, there it was, spoken out loud. He had killed his parents. He had killed many people but the heaviest of all, was his parents.
