Page 176 of Sins of the Hidden

"You were a child," Her voice broke on the words, tears flowing freely down her face, pressing her forehead to mine. Her fingers combed gently through my hair, the motion steady and grounding. My body responded beneath hers. My hands came up to frame her face, mirroring her hold on me.

"I don't—" The words caught in my throat, strangled by decades of enforced silence. Memories flickered—needle through flesh, mouth sewn shut, laughter. My voice, when it emerged, was stripped raw, barely recognizable as my own. "I don't know how to be human anymore."

"I don't see a monster," she whispered, our noses touching. Her breath ghosted against the puckered flesh where needle and thread had once sealed my voice away.

"I'm not a monster?" The question broke loose from my chest like a sob I'd spent my life containing, my voice carrying something I'd never allowed it to hold before.

"You're not a monster," her voice softened. "You're my husband."

Her thumb brushed the corner of my mouth where the worst of the scarring was, and I suppressed the urge to turn away, to hide the evidence of what had been done to me. I observed the shift in her breathing—the way her chest stuttered, the change where fear had lived.

Her gaze dropped to my mouth, lingering on the marks. The air between us seemed to thin, making it difficult to breathe. Her chest rose and fell in quick, shallow movements, the flush on her skin spreading from her cheeks down her neck.

She leaned forward, her lips hovering mere centimeters from mine, her breath against my mouth—felt like salvation, forgiveness, and punishment all at once. The anticipation was its own kind of exquisite agony, stretching between us like a thread pulled taut to breaking.

Her lips finally met mine, so softly at first I barely felt it—tentative, terrified—her touch ghosting over the ridged landscape of my scars. For both of us, this was the first time—skin against skin, no mask between us, nothing to hide behind. The first contact sent electricity down my spine, every nerve ending in my scarred mouth coming alive with sensation I'd never experienced.

Her lips were so soft. Everything I'd fucking dreamed about.

My hands remained frozen at my sides, fingers twitching with uncertainty. I didn't know where to put them—how to receive something like this. The gentleness was foreign territory, more terrifying than any violence I'd endured. Slowly, like moving through water, my hands lifted from my sides, hovering near her waist without touching, afraid I'd break the spell.

Her mouth grew more confident against mine, and I felt the shift—the moment her tenderness began to sharpen into something hungrier. She pressed closer, her lips moving with increasing urgency, and finally my hands found their purpose, settling against her waist with careful pressure, fingers spreading across the soft flesh there.

Suddenly, she was kissing me with desperation—punishing in its intensity, like she needed to hurt me to prove she could stand it. The moment her lips pressed into mine with renewed force, something feral and half-dead clawed its way up my spine—sharp, breathless, begging to be felt.

My body jerked beneath her mouth, nerves misfiring as my grip on her waist tightened reflexively. Being kissed like I was worth the softness she gave felt more brutal than anything I'dsurvived. It wasn't just unfamiliar. It was agony. Tenderness became a scalpel, slicing open parts of me I hadn't known were still alive. Places I'd buried so deep, even pain hadn't reached them—until her.

My mouth moved against hers like it had been waiting a lifetime, unsure, broken, but starved. I tasted grief—raw, searing, painfully sweet—like sorrow finally gasping for air after being buried alive. The kiss didn't just mark her, it engraved itself into the softest parts of her, deeper than memory, deeper than blood. It would live in her like a wound that never closed, something she'd bleed from every time she remembered what it cost us to feel this.

Her fingers found their way to my hair, tangling in the strands at the nape of my neck, pulling me closer with an urgency that stole what little breath I had left. The gentle scrape of her nails against my scalp sent electric currents racing down my spine, each touch lighting up nerve pathways that had been dormant for years.

She fit against me too perfectly—soft, trusting, all tender flesh offering itself to hands that only knew how to hurt. She pressed in like I was safety, not ruin, seeking comfort from the one person who could only give it by taking everything else away.

The kiss deepened, her tongue tentatively tracing the seam of my scarred lips. Granting her entry with a controlled exhale, her tongue sliding against mine sent a violent tremor through my entire body. The taste of her flooded my mouth—alive and impossibly sweet. I'd never tasted anything but copper and ash for so long that the flavor of her nearly would have brought me to my knees.

Oakley poured everything she couldn't say into that kiss—her grief over what had been done to me, her rage at those who had broken me, her guilt for not knowing, her love for what I had broken between us. I felt each emotion as it passed from herbody to mine, a current of feeling so intense it threatened to stop my heart.

My hands moved from her waist to press deeper into the soft flesh there, the careful control giving way to something more desperate. Each stroke of her tongue against mine broke another chain inside me, the links snapping one by one, unleashing something I'd locked away so deeply I'd forgotten it existed.

Our lips moved together with desperate synchronicity, painfully tender—a raw confession without words, two broken hearts bleeding into each other. The world around us fell away, leaving nothing but the points where our bodies connected, where her heartbeat echoed inside my chest as if it belonged there. Time ceased to exist. There was only her mouth on mine, her hands in my hair, the way she tasted like salvation and damnation wrapped in one perfect, devastating package.

Pulling apart, our chests heaved, breaths uneven as if we'd run for miles. Her pupils were blown wide, nearly eclipsing the color of her irises. Her lips were swollen and flushed, glistening in the dim light. My eyes remained steady, focused.

This wasn't just a kiss. This was Oakley trying to stitch my broken pieces together with her mouth, knowing it would never be enough but trying desperately anyway. Oakley didn't realize she was my first kiss—with and without the mask. She knew that she'd never be able to erase the scars, no matter if she chose to love me, to forgive me.

Some wounds went too deep for love to ever fully heal.

Her hands stayed firm against my chest, holding me upright when I couldn't hold myself. Her strength flowed into me where we touched, keeping me tethered to the present when I might otherwise have dissolved into the past.

The silence between us grew heavy, laden with unspoken truths. Oakley's lips parted, hands moving slightly as she gathered her courage. I watched the subtle shift in herexpression—the way her eyes darkened, how her throat worked around words that terrified her. Her chest rose and fell with quickening breaths, the pulse at the hollow of her throat fluttering like a trapped bird.

My heart maintained its rhythm in my chest. Something warm and foreign expanded beneath my ribs, pressing against my lungs until breathing became difficult. The admission rewrote something fundamental between us, shifting the power that had always been mine into something shared, something fragile.

Her thumb brushed over the spot my heart was supposed to be. "There's so much about you to love."

My fingers wrapped around her wrist, not to trap or restrain, but to keep her there, to hold her hand against the part of me she owned as if it could keep my heart beating and my lungs breathing. The question formed in my chest and reached my lips, clawing its way up my throat. I tried to push it back down, to bury it deep where all my other vulnerabilities lived, but it escaped anyway.

"Then why don't you love me?"

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