Underneath the depiction, there was a row of lines grouped in bundles of four with a diagonal line bunching each one. There had to be at least ten of those. . . .

“You’ve killed . . .” She couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.

“Forty-nine. And before you think I’m glorifying what I’ve done, each of us has this in our skin. It’s not voluntary.”

That was nearly ten a year. One a month. Lives lost at his hands.

With a quick, slashing movement, Isaac pulled his windbreaker and sweatshirt down—and just as well. That tattoo was terrifying.

Turning to face her, he met her squarely in the eye and seemed to be waiting for a response.

All she could think about was Daniel . . . God, Daniel. Her brother was a notch on the back of one or some of those soldiers, a little line drawn by a needle, marked permanently in ink.

She had been tattooed, too, by the death. On the inside. The sight of him dead and gone—and now the stain of the details of that night—were forever on her mind.

And it was the same for what she’d found out about her father’s other life. And Isaac’s.

Grier braced her hands on her knees and shook her head. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“I don’t blame you. I’m going to leave—”

“About your past.”

As she cut him off, she shook her head again. She’d been on a whirlwind since the moment he’d walked into that attorney-client room back at the jail. Caught up in a buzz, she’d spun faster and faster, from the run-in with that man with the eye patch to the sex to the showdown with her father . . . to Isaac hitting the self-destruct button sure as if he’d pulled the pin out of a grenade.

But somehow, as soon as he’d done that, she felt as though the storm was over and done, the tornado having moved on to someone else’s cornfield.

In the aftermath, everything seemed so clear and simple.

She shrugged and kept staring at him. “I really can’t say anything about your past . . . but I do have an opinion on your future.” Her exhale was long and slow and sounded as exhausted as she felt. “I don’t think you should turn yourself in to die. Two wrongs don’t make a right. In fact, nothing can make what you did right, but you don’t need me telling you that. What you’ve done is going to follow you around all the days of your life—it is a ghost that will never leave you.”

And the dark shadows in his eyes told her he knew that better than anyone.