18. Lucina
LUCINA
Smoke-free air fills my lungs, and it’s… euphoric. Gods, I took it for granted.
A burst of adrenaline crashes through me like a steep tidal wave, and tears spill across my cheeks. I open my eyes to release them—
And I’m met with grey ones. Desperate, grey ones.
“There you are,” Callan murmurs around a cork clamped between his teeth, an empty glass vial in the hand he has wrapped underneath my chin. “Tell me where it hurts.”
My lips part to speak, but no sound comes out, so I just hold my hands out to him, palms up. I can’t even look at the flesh I know is ruined.
The Captain’s eyes fall to my hands, and he sucks in a sharp breath. He grips my shoulders gently, moving me until the backs of my thighs hit the cushions of a couch. I fall into it as he storms into another room without another word.
I still can’t look down, but the adrenaline is starting to recede, and then it won’t matter where I’m looking, the pain will be impossible to ignore.
Alive, I remind myself. I’m alive.
And I’m inside a cabin, but it definitely isn’t mine.
There’s not a flame in sight. Across from the couch are two plush navy-blue armchairs with a fireplace built into the wall behind them.
A wooden coffee table sits in the center of the space, and a dark grey and black woven area rug covers the hardwood.
To my right is a small kitchenette, an island in the center with a few bar stools tucked underneath it, and a hallway beside it that I can’t see all the way down.
Pain bursts through my palms, and I whip my gaze to the ceiling, absentmindedly counting the ridges in the tin roof until Callan returns as quickly as he’d left, with what looks like a first aid kit.
He pulls the coffee table close and sits down on the edge of it, careful not to bump his knees into my burnt ones as he spreads the kit wide beside him. When he reaches for my hands, I hesitate, my jaw clenching so hard it aches.
“Please,” he asks softly. “This is my fault. Let me fix it.”
I peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth, watching him with watery eyes. “You tried to barbeque me?” It was meant to be a joke, a poor one at that, but it’s all I have at the moment. It’s mainly a distraction anyway, and I use the time it takes me to say the words to slide my hands over to him.
“You have jokes?” he asks, a bit concerned and slightly amazed, then his stare falls, and any hint of a smile vanishes off his face.
“No, I didn’t.” Callan shakes his head, then lifts it.
His voice goes stone cold, as icy as his stare.
“I’d never do this to you, Lucina. It’s important to me that you understand that. ”
“Then why would it be your fault?” I slip into the calmest state I can find, hanging onto the adrenaline as best I can, clinging to it like it’s the last shred of hope I have.
He moves silently, rummaging through the kit like any sudden movement might take me out of this semi-calm state.
“I wasn’t there.” He says the words fast, timing them perfectly with the first swipe of a lukewarm washcloth, and the pain lingers even after he lifts it, a sharp throb that radiates up my arms. “That’s why it’s my fault.”
He did leave.
“What happened?” I ask as he readies the blood-stained washcloth again and I hiss when it hits the raw skin.
“I saw someone in the woods.” Callan gives me a second to breathe before doing it again, supplementing it with another bone-chilling confession.
“He was standing behind your cabin. I couldn’t see his face; he took off running when he saw me.
I should have stayed and made sure you were alright, but I didn’t.
” He abandons the washcloth and reaches for a small tin of salve.
“I ran after him. Then I lost him in the woods, and when I came back…everything was on fire. I got you out as fast as I could.”
A tear slips down my cheeks when more precious adrenaline wears off, and Callan curses, “Fuck, Lucina, I should have been there.” His shoulders fall, his hands moving so gently over my own as if that will make it hurt less. “I’m so sorry.”
It’s the sincerest apology I’ve ever received, and I’ve had my fair share of them. “You didn’t know.”
“I should have known,” he fires back, a sharpness to his tone that he quickly smothers. “It was a distraction, Lucina. He wanted me to give chase, and I did.”
I stare at him until his eyes meet mine. “I’m okay.”
“Something tells me you’d never admit it if you weren’t,” he says simply, then twists off the lid to the salve. “This is going to hurt, Chaos, but you can handle it.”
I don’t know what that salve is, but I’m not dumb enough to call his bluff.
“Distract me,” I spit out, my voice dry and hoarse.
Callan thinks for a moment, then he uses his free hand to unclip his vest, sliding it off his shoulders. He sets my hand carefully on his knee and reaches for the collar of his shirt, tugging the thin fabric over his head in one quick motion. Then he tosses it to the floor.
I’d curse the gods, but I seem to have forgotten their names.
His chest is tanned, broad, and scarred. Every bit of his torso is chiseled, but I knew it would be. I often catch glimpses of muscles working underneath his shirt during training, but I’d never seen them… bare.
I drink in the distraction, shamelessly, my eyes roaming over all the cut ridges and shallow valleys between each muscle. He watches all of this, but I don’t care, not even as the hint of a smirk plays at his mouth.
“Ready?” he asks, dipping his finger into the salve and inching a bit closer.
I nod, focusing on the distraction, ignoring the sheer audacity he has to assume his bare chest will pull my focus long enough to heal—my eyes fall to more ripples of muscle in his shoulders.
Fuck me, it actually might. For some reason, Ivy’s laughter sounds in the back of my head. She’d have thought this was hilarious, then she would pester me with it until the end of time.
With all the care in the world, Callan pulls my right hand towards him.
“They’re called Sol Marks,” he says, and my brows furrow.
What? “My father used them. He painted them all around my room when I was a baby.” I hiss through my teeth at the first rub of the salve, the sudden pain jarring me from my calm state, but his words pull me right back into it.
“I memorized the shapes of them, and I’d draw them any chance I got.
” Callan gestures a salve-covered finger to his torso. “I’d trace them along my skin.”
Holy gods. He hadn’t taken off his shirt just so I’d drool over his abs…
All along his ribs is a tattoo of black circles, marks with various lines and squiggles cutting through each one like its own language. The ink runs up and over his heart, across his left shoulder, and it ends midway down his bicep.
“Those are—” I’m cut off when pain bursts behind my eyes, and my shoulders tense up. He waits patiently as I force down a deep breath.
“I’m good,” I assure him. “Keep talking.” My voice is getting better, but it burns every time I speak, just not nearly as bad as my hands do. Or my knees.
“This is what he painted around my room.” Callan reaches for something else in his kit, and my breaths come steadier as the salve starts mending the broken skin, the sting receding into a dull ache.
“After the attack, drawing them was all I did for a while. I wouldn’t speak to anyone; I’d just sit and trace them and wonder if I’d made it all up.
” He pauses when I don’t flinch at the next rub of the salve. “You, okay?”
“Mhm,” I nod. “Tell me more.”
He studies me for a moment, then takes a deep breath. “It took years for me to translate them.”
My gaze falls when he points to one just over his heart, a circle with a thin line spiraling around its center.
“This one,” he says, waiting for it to draw all my attention, then he rubs salve on my other hand when I’m good and distracted.
I tense briefly through the pain, but it’s not nearly as jarring as before.
“It’s called the Draal,” Callan says softly.
“It translates to evolving strength. The action of becoming stronger through life.” He blows gently on my other palm, and the thick paste hardens, then he picks up gauze and begins unraveling it.
“What about that one?” I blurt, nodding to a circle near the bottom of his ribs with a narrow oval in the center of it.
I swear he smirks as he wraps a thin layer of gauze over my hand. “Syla Ren,” he replies quietly, then tucks the thin white material in place, setting my freshly bandaged hand back in my lap. “It was my mother’s favorite. My favorite too.”
Of all the Marks on this man’s body, I pick that one. Of course.
This time, when he reaches for my other hand, I give it willingly.
The gauze is feather light as he drags it across the hardened salve.
“Syla Ren is the mark of storms,” he tells me.
“Violent ones. The kind that changes everything and flips the world upside down.” His eyes flicker to mine for a moment. “It’s chaos, Chaos.”
I glare back at him. “So, it’s an insult then? Calling me Chaos. Violent, deadly, and uncontrolled?”
His head shakes once. “Boundless, defiant, and free.”
It takes me a few seconds to find my breath, but I do find it. Eventually. “And that Mark means all of that?” I blurt the first question that comes to mind.
He grins, noting the traitorous flush that I’m trying so hard to smother. “To me it does.”
Suddenly, I’m not distracted by his tattoo or his bare torso anymore; I’m distracted by the way he talks.
I’ve never met someone so willing to speak their mind, and he does so unflinchingly, no matter what he has to say.
It's intimidating in a way I don’t understand, but it makes me feel… weird. Lightheaded. Dizzy?
I refocus on all the symbols inked into his skin, a river of coin-sized circles that I want to know the meanings of as badly as I want to touch them. Chiaros, Cin, get a fucking grip.