They were sitting on the thick rug in front of the fire. Lexi was curled in a white robe. Christan had donned a pair of jeans and was stretched out like a great cat. The caretaker, an elderly Brit named William Strome, brought up food, and Christan insisted she eat.
Firelight spilled warm light across the floor, over the curve of Christan’s shoulder. He was shirtless. Hard muscles across his chest bore the scars of his life. It was the first time Lexi had seen the entire tattoo that snaked across his back and shoulder, down his left arm to just below the elbow. It was pagan, the copper and black lines forming an intricate tracing beneath the skin, a primitive language that spoke of violence and war. She remembered touching, biting some of those lines. She refused to look away.
Christan was watching her, his expression guarded.
She reached out and touched him.
“What are these lines?”
“My life.”
“How do you get them?”
“We used to record our history, until one day the history recorded itself. The tattoos are sensate memories beneath the skin. When I press here, I can relive that moment. Press here, I relive another.”
“They give you a way of recalling everything?”
“I have lived a very long life.”
“How long?” she asked, curious.
“Too long,” was his only answer.
She leaned forward, her fingers lightly touching his skin before she traced the line that moved across his shoulder. “This one?”
His eyes narrowed as if a storm were brewing. Her gaze remained steady while her fingertip pressed against his skin.
“Do you feel this?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What does it feel like?”
“Death. I smell fire and smoke, feel the heat as my hand closes around a blade. I revel in the confusion, the massive crush of bodies as men go to war. I rip into flesh, shout over screams of dying men, taste the iron warmth in my throat. I have the power to create whatever destruction I desire. It’s what I was then,” he said. “What I still am now.”
“And this?” she asked, ignoring the way his lips tightened. He took a deep breath, and she pressed harder.
“This,” she repeated, as he sank his fingers around her hand and held it in place.
“It was never my nature to be a good man.”
“I don’t believe you, Christan,” she insisted. “This line.”
“You.”
“And this one?”
“Also you.”
“Which one is Gemma?” she asked, watching his hard face. He took her hand and moved it closer to his heart.
“This one.”
There was steel in his grip, perhaps a truth he didn’t want her to discover. Her hand trembled but she pressed against him anyway, traced the dark tattoo. Touch was such an intimate act. If tattoos were remnants of sensation, she felt the shattering reality: how he saw her, loved her, ultimately hated her. It was the hardest thing she’d ever had to face and she did so now, shoving her way through grief and regret just to come up for air.
She owed him the truth.
“I need to tell you,” she said, and even that small admission was incredibly difficult to make. Honesty was a feeling one had to get used to, knowing even as you spoke the words you were destroying what you’d once believed. She needed a moment, just one moment to feel him still beside her before she walked that path alone.
He cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have to do this.”
“I do.” She was trying to remember what it felt like, to love him then. So bone-crushingly painful she couldn’t process the depths to which she’d plunged. But really, could she have done anything worse than continue that hatred into this lifetime? What had she said weeks ago? That she hated him? And he said it was so easy to do.
They were too close. Her heart felt bruised, and she stood from the floor and stepped back, his attention focused on her.
“What I remember,” she said, “was that Gemma hated the fighting, but she couldn’t make herself stop. She was so bitter toward the end. Nico was the one way she could punish you. She would do anything, say anything if it drew blood.”
It hurt just to look at him, watching as if he refused to hear the words. Beyond her, the fire flared up in a rush of sparks, orange, bright yellow at the edges, blending into white. She tried to understand what drove Gemma to such extremes, but she couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t think of anything he could have done that would make her feel that way now.
He was waiting, and Lexi forced herself to speak.
“She was with Nico the night after you returned. I remember a darkened room, where she found you staring into the fire. There was a fight and she ran outside. Nico was there, and she confided in him. Her sister lived too far away to be a confidant, but Nico—he was kind when he came to visit. He teased her, played chess with her when she was lonely.”
“He made her happy?”
“She thought he was her friend.”
A muscle ticked in his jaw. “Did she know who he was?”
“No, not if you mean did she know he was Kace—Wallace, Nico, they were all the same. Just names.” A pause, a bitter laugh. “Whatever else you might think of me in that lifetime, Christan, Nico was never her lover. And when Gemma was on the road that night, she wasn’t meeting him. She was running away from him.”
“Why?” Christan’s voice had thickened, and it was hard to admit, in the intimacy of the fire-lit room, but she deserved every hateful word he’d ever thrown. She closed her eyes. Confessing her sin to this man seemed like a death from a thousand knives. She did it anyway.
“Gemma was many things. I think she was a woman with strong passions that she didn’t always control. Especially with you. She loved you in the beginning, but mostly, she hated you, because you were always just beyond her reach. That was all she wanted, Christan. She wanted you, and when she couldn’t have you she turned to Nico.”
Lexi bent her head, allowed the curtain of blond hair to obscure her expression. “I think she knew what she was doing, in fact, I know she knew. She felt guilty enough to light a candle in the chapel and try to bargain with God.”
Lexi paused for a moment, straightened and pushed the hair back from her face, unwilling to appear afraid.
“That night, she felt humiliated. There was talk in the village, between the staff, about the reasons you stayed away. She’d had enough of it. Nico found her in the garden and he discussed the vendetta, said Gemma had no male relatives to defend her. He offered, described a random attack, mercenaries on the roadway. He said that he would attack you, try to kill you and all she had to do was ask.”
“And did she ask?” It was the question that had never been answered. Dark, lethal interrogation had entered Christan’s voice, demanding details, and Lexi knew the wound she ripped open would bleed for more than this lifetime.
“Yes. I won’t excuse what she did—what I did. Gemma asked, and then she tried to take it back. She felt guilty, realized it was the worst kind of betrayal, that you didn’t deserve it. But Nico said she was a coward, that she wanted your death, just didn’t want to hold the knife. And he was right. She was a coward. She could have stopped it with an anonymous warning, sent to any of the men loyal to you, but instead she committed an even greater sin than asking Nico to kill you. She wrote a confession and left it for the priest in a place he wouldn’t find it. She put her few possessions in a bag made of tapestry and she ran away from what she’d done.”