“Almost,” I whisper.
He smiles. “So where was I?” He lifts up the palm of my hand and kisses it. “One.” He kisses my right temple. “Two.” Then next is my mouth. He kisses my tongue. “Three.” He reaches for the hem of my T-shirt and lifts it over my head, revealing my chest scar, between my bra cups. He does what I did, makes the shape of it with his finger before kissing it gently. “Four.” Then he moves down slowly, kissing my belly button, which isn’t branded, but I’m not complaining, and he removes my shoes and socks. The sole of my right foot for your collusion with the Flawed, for walking alongside them, and for stepping away from society. He kisses my foot, I feel him whisper, “Five,” with his lips on my skin, and I hear the voices, the shouts, the fury, the pounding of the hammer of the courtroom all in my head. I’m almost dizzy from reliving it.
He kneels and looks at me.
I’m nervous. My heart is pounding. I vowed to never let anyone see this.
“Turn over,” he says.
I shake my head, swallow hard.
His enormous hands take my hips and turn me. I move with him so that I’m lying on my side. He lies down beside me, behind me, hand on my waist. If he’s disgusted by what he sees he doesn’t show it. The sixth brand wasn’t planned, it was carried out without anesthetic by a furious and out-of-control Crevan. I jerked when it happened, as I felt it burn through my skin. The F is gaudy and unclear, it’s as brutal-looking as it felt.
He starts at the nape of my neck with his tongue and he traces my spine all the way down to my lower back. There, he kisses my most painful brand—yet the one he believes to be my most powerful of all.
I hear Crevan amid all the branding chamber panic. Brand her spine! We have never seen anyone so Flawed to their very backbone.… Until his voice dies out and I can’t hear him anymore. He’s gone from my head. Cleansed.
“Six,” Carrick and I whisper in unison.
TWENTY-THREE
IT’S CLOSE IN THE CABIN, the small window doesn’t allow any air in on the still, hot night. We’re tangled in the covers, my leg draped over Carrick’s, my head against his chest. My left hand is resting on his chest, guarding his brand, and his left hand is holding mine, his finger circling my palm. I don’t know if he notices that this is the natural position we’ve both adopted.
“So I guess two Flawed make a perfect,” Carrick says, and I giggle. “I don’t do jokes well,” he says with a small smile.
“You don’t need to. You just be serious and mean and sexy.” I kiss his jaw.
Art was funny, it was what I adored most about him. He always made me laugh; he lightened every tense atmosphere with his well-timed observations. He also managed to be appropriately inappropriate, which is a feat. Guilt envelops my mind, and I stiffen.
“Okay?” Carrick asks.
“Mmm-hmm.”
But it’s as if he can read my mind. “I was thinking, we do have a way to get to Crevan. You have more power over him than you know. Apparently he’s close to his son, particularly now. Crevan would do anything for him.”
I freeze. Use Art?
I’m so disgusted by the suggestion, by the tactless timing and the way it was raised, that I clamber off Carrick, clumsily, trying to untie my body from his, but he’s so strong and it’s tricky. I eventually get away from him and off the bed, but only because he gives up the fight, and I hurriedly start putting my clothes back on.
“Come on, Celestine.” He sits up, bedsheets low on his hips, revealing the tattoo of a weather vane on his hip, the one he says he got when he was sixteen on a school trip away and won’t tell me why.
“Is that why you slept with me?” I snap. “To make me fall for your plan? So you could use me to get to Art, to get to Crevan?”
“No,” he says, annoyed but calm. He doesn’t raise his voice, doesn’t get dramatic like me. He just says steadily, “Anything we can do to get our lives back, we should do.”
“Without hurting the people we love.”
Pause.
“You love him?” he asks, revealing nothing.
“No! I mean, no.”
“You’re still wearing the anklet he gave you.”
“How do you know he gave me that?”
“The chamber.”
I remember now. I’d refused to take it off. The guard who branded me was the very same blacksmith who had made it. It had shaken him to see it on me, branding a girl Flawed who he had only days previously thought was perfect, even if he didn’t know me.
“So you’ll protect Art no matter what he’s done to you?” he asks.
“What exactly do you think he’s done to me?”
Art ran away after the branding, he hid out, only letting Juniper know where he was, which hurt me deeply. But I’ve since realized he wasn’t trying to hide from me, he didn’t want to hurt me. He was trying to stay away from his dad, whom he hated for what he’d done to me, and anyway, Carrick wouldn’t know anything about that. He wasn’t around, and I didn’t tell him. “Carrick, what are you talking about? What do you think Art has done to me?”
“Nothing,” he says, his face unreadable.
“Carrick, no secrets, tell me everything.” I’m aware of my hypocrisy, seeing as I haven’t told him about not actually possessing the footage.
Deadpan face again, revealing nothing, but then it breaks. “If I were him, I wouldn’t have left you like that on the bus. He let them take you away from him. I wouldn’t have let them take you without a fight. I would have made them take me, too. I would have stood beside you on the bus and in court. I would have told the media the truth. Everybody wanted to hear from him, and he chose not to say anything.”
“He did try to speak for me in court…” I say quietly.
“His last-minute hissy fit? It was too late. It was more of a tantrum against his dad than anything else. I just wouldn’t have let it happen,” he says simply.
I start to realize what exactly Granddad meant when he said Art had cut me loose. I never thought about it the way Carrick phrased it. I kept understanding Art’s perspective; his fear, his situation, but maybe Carrick’s right—perhaps Art could have spoken up for me more.
“You were there for me in court every day,” I say, remembering. Carrick was loyal to me; Carrick showed the support that my boyfriend at the time didn’t. “But you hated me when you first saw me.” I smile, sitting back down on the bed.
“Hated you,” he agrees.
“Hey!” I slap him playfully on his arm. He catches my hand and pulls me close.
“You were hugging Crevan,” he says. “I remember you all, huddled around the table with your parents and him, trying to come up with a way out of it, your fancy clothes all laid out like they were going to fix it all.”
I picture my story from his angle, and I don’t blame him for hating me. It was pathetic.
“When did you stop hating me?” I ask.