Page 29 of Edge of Oblivion (Night Prowler 2)
She’d never seen scars like that. Long welts raised in white, crisscrossed in dense patterns all across his shoulders, upper back, spine. Imagining exactly what had caused them stole the breath from her lungs and made her legs go weak.
He slowly raised his head and met her gaze in the mirror. He wore that dead expression again, the absence of all feeling that had so frightened her the first time she’d glimpsed his face. He straightened—slowly, as if it pained him—and then she noticed his chest, reflected in a clouded outline in the mirror.
If she thought his back a painful sight, his chest was a maddening riddle. On both sides of his sternum at the level of his heart there were fields of straight lines. Black hatch marks on the right side in groups of four lines with a diagonal fifth, red hatch marks on the left, over his heart. There were dozens of them, more than that, row after row of stark, unembellished marks. They were the strangest tattoos she could imagine having.
“It’s a count,” he said very low to the mirror. She started.
A terrible idea began to form in her mind, one that she felt like icy fingers invading her brain.
She pushed it back, horrified.
He turned and faced her, without hurry, without expression, his arms hanging loose at his sides.
He made no attempt to cover himself, no attempt to hide from her open-mouthed alarm, as if he were inviting her disgust. As if he wanted it.
“Red for Ikati, black for others,” he said tonelessly.
And then she knew.
“Kills,” she whispered, understanding beyond the impulse to bury it. Her gaze skipped over his muscled chest, trying not to add, trying not to imagine all the lives reduced to short, blunt hatch marks on an assassin’s chest.
She lifted her gaze to his face. “Why?” she said in a small voice.
His hands curled to fists. “Why what?”
“Why do you keep track?”
The question startled him. He blinked and it was there again, that depth of urgent pathos, welling to the surface. A flash and it was gone, vanished behind the expression of emptiness she’d come to recognize as his mask, a very good, very practiced one, one that hid his genuine feelings well.
Almost.
He answered without inflection, his eyes as empty as his voice.
“So I always remember exactly what I am and what I have to answer for. So I can never fool myself into thinking I’m anything but a monster.”
She breathed in sharply. A monster. That’s what they’d called her, too.
Her heart began to ache, but not just for the carnage she witnessed carved into his bare flesh, and not for the red line she knew was waiting for her, the final one that would finish off an uncompleted group of four just above his left nipple.
Her heart ached for him. For the terrible toll all that death must have taken on his soul.
Haven’t you ever wanted a different sort of life? she’d asked him just yesterday, thinking only of herself. She wondered now how many times he must have wished for that very thing.
“I ordered some food,” she said, clearing her throat of the frog in it. “I thought you might be hungry.”
He stared back at her as if this were the last thing on Earth he had been expecting. She knew exactly how he felt.
“I’ll just...wait for you to get dressed.”
She turned and walked slowly from the room, leaving him staring silently after her.
In a dream, he dressed.
Underwear, pants, shirt, shoes. Knives in his boots and belt, hair combed carelessly with his fingers. Teeth brushed, watch strapped to his left wrist, his heart like a splintered piece of wood inside his chest.
That was new. He wasn’t thinking about it.
I thought you might be hungry, she’d said in response to his unrepentant admission of sin, and that was all it took. The blood on his hands had soaked so deep, into every pore and atom; the things he had done were so awful they cou
