He pushed the sweater into my hands and turned away, looking at the wall across the room as if it

held the secrets of life.

It wasn’t so much the sweater or the way half of me was hanging out of my now-only-fit-for-therag-pile shirt. It wasn’t so much the pale matte of his skin, striped with drying blood.

It was the three angry pucker-shaped holes in his back, looking curiously bloodless as they closed,

slowly but visibly healing. Bullet holes, healing before my eyes.

And the scars.

He looked like he’d been rolled in broken glass. The scar tissue crawled up and down his back, pale

shiny ropes against the otherwise perfection of his skin, reaching nasty-looking fingers up around

his ribs. They moved as he breathed, and I sat there and stared for a bit while my heart thudded and

blood soughed in my veins and I found out I was still alive.

“Dru,” he said finally, “do you have it on yet?”

“Oh. I, um. Just a sec.” It took me two tries to get the rags of my T-shirt off, and my arms shook

when I pulled the sweater over my head. It even smelled like him, and there were three holes in the

back. But the front was pretty much okay, even if the V-neck was a bit deep on me. He looked deceptively skinny, but I saw the muscle moving as he shifted his weight a little bit, then hardening

like a marble statue when he went still in that way older djamphir do.

Those were bullet holes. Bullets he’d stopped while he was crouched over me. But the other scars . .

. Jesus.

“What are those from?” I whispered.

For just a split second, his shoulders hunched as if he was embarrassed. “We can scar, you know.”

Flat, quiet. Informing me, nothing more. “Before we hit the drift. And after, if the wound is severe

enough. Life-threatening.”

I didn’t want to point out that he’d avoided the question. Again. My teeth tingled, especially my upper canines.

They’re fangs, Dru. Call them what they are.

“What happened?” It seemed like I couldn’t make my voice work like usual. The pretty-muchhealed fang marks on my wrist twinged once, and I rubbed them against my blood-sodden jeans.

The whole room was drenched with the coppery smell, taunting the bloodhunger.

He stiffened. “I was disobedient. Are you done?”

I nodded, realized he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Um. Thanks. Christophe—”

He rounded on me, eyes blazing, crossed the distance between us with two quick steps. I was suddenly nose-to-nose with him, so close the heat coming off him in waves caressed my cheeks like

sunlight on already burned skin.

“I told you to stay there. There was cover there, and Leontus would have made sure you were safe.”

The words were raw, like they were sandpaper-scraping his throat to get out. “I could have lost

you.”