Page 43 of Ten Rules for Loving the Wrong Rake

They reached his bedroom last.

The bed was unmade. The sheets tangled, the blanket shoved to one side, the pillow still dented with two shapes—hers and his, side by side, from the night he had carried her from the settee and lain down beside her on top of the covers.

She had gone to his room that night for a reason she still could not fully justify to herself. She had lain in her own bed for an hour, listening to the house. Every sound had been magnified by the sealed windows—the tick of cooling pipes, the creak of settling timber, the scratch of a branch against a boarded pane that could have been a branch or could have been a hand. She had pulled the blanket to her chin and stared at the ceiling and understood that she was alone on the upper floor of a house that dangerous men were coming to, and the only person in it who could fight them was somewhere below her, digging in the dark.

He set the planks against the wall and measured the window. She held the chalk. The room smelled of him, soap and wood shavings.

He lifted the first plank to the high window, both arms raised above his head, pressing it flat to the frame. His shirt pulled free of his waistband and rode up his ribs.

She saw the brand.

She had felt it in the tunnel. Her fingers had passed over it in the dark and she had not known what it was—ridged skin, raised, a texture that did not match the rest of him. She had thought it was a burn, which it was, but not the kind she had imagined.

Two letters. Seared into the skin below his ribs on the left side, the scar tissue pale and puckered, the edges sharp where the iron had been pressed and held. The letters were clear in the daylight. Unmistakable. She could see where the skin had blistered and healed and blistered again, the way burns do when they are deep and deliberate.

R.A.

He drove the nail. Lowered his arms. His shirt fell back into place. She held the next plank and he nailed it and they moved to the second window and she said nothing. But the letters sat behind her eyes and would not leave.

She thought about what kind of instrument makes letters that clean. A branding iron. Custom-made. Shaped and heated and pressed into skin the way a farmer brands cattle, the way a man marks his property, so that anyone who sees the mark knows who it belongs to. Someone had commissioned that iron. Someone had heated it. Someone had held him down.

She thought about Kit at twelve. He would have been small. Thin, probably. Underfed. A boy. Someone's boy. Held down by hands he could not fight, his shirt pulled up, the iron coming toward him, and the sound—she could not think about the sound without her stomach turning.

She set the chalk down. They were standing in front of the last window. The only unboarded glass left in the house. The sunlight came through it in a wide rectangle that fell across the floorboards between them and lit the dust.

"The mark on your ribs," she said. "What does it stand for?"

He was holding a plank against the frame, one arm raised. He did not lower it.

A silence. He drove the nail. Lowered the plank. Picked up another.

"Reeve Alcott."

She had expected it. She had prepared herself for the answer. She was not prepared for what it did to her. The anger she had carried since his confession shifted. The cold, righteous anger that had kept her upright through the barricading, through the flinch, through the long hours of hammering nails beside a man she could not trust, had shifted into grief. For the boy.

He lifted the last plank to the window. Both arms up. The shirt rode again and she saw the brand again, the two letters, R.A., pale against his ribs.

Hugh had done this to her with words. With the hand that moved from her elbow to the back of her neck. With "useless" whispered into her skin as though he were etching it there, and in a way he had. Your body was not yours. You belonged to the man who marked you.

She reached out and touched the brand.

He flinched. A small, sharp jerk, his body recoiling. The plank slipped in his hands. He caught it. Held it. Did not move.

Her fingers rested on the scar tissue. She could feel the raised edges of the letters beneath her fingertips. The skin was smooth between the ridges and rough where it had healed badly. Warm from his body. She traced the R. Then the A.

"Does it hurt?"

"No."

"You flinched."

"No one has touched it." He swallowed. "Ever."

"Not even a physician?"

"Not like that." A pause. "Not the way you just did."

She looked up at him. His jaw was tight. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling.