Chapter 38 #2
It reaches a clawed hand forward. I press my eyes closed and brace for what comes next.
I expect it to grab me. To lean forward and devour me with a massive bite and sickening crunch.
But it doesn’t. Instead, that claw scores my chest. It burns so sharply, I’m certain it has punctured my breastbone. I scream.
Then…light.
“Does it hurt?” Lucan jolts me from my thoughts. He’s standing before me at the bedside. I was so distracted, I hadn’t even seen him approach.
Lowering my hand from my sternum, I bring my attention back to him, banishing the memories to the recesses of my mind.
“No, it doesn’t hurt. Sometimes, it feels as though there’s wire corded around my heart—like it cannot fully beat as it should.
The scar itches, and that can send tiny, invisible bugs across my skin.
Or every part of me feels too stiff. It’s all uncomfortable, but not painful. And fortunately inconsistent.”
I can feel the warmth from his body and shift backward on the bed. He must take this as an invitation, because he settles into the space I’ve left on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. I resist leaning into him.
“May I see it?”
Even though I usually hate showing people, something about Lucan feels…
different. I don’t instantly grate at the question.
More than that, I find I don’t mind if he sees.
This scar is mine, yet part of it is shared with him—he was a part of that day, even if I’ve never known it.
My hands move to the laces on my vest, loosening them.
I pull down my neckline, but it’s still comfortably above my smallclothes.
Even so, I’m less fastened up than I’ve been in ages in front of someone else, and I’m unable to resist taking a deep breath.
Lucan’s eyes drop to my chest, causing heat to rise up my neck. He’s not looking at me romantically. I know he’s not. Despite this, his attention feels different than any other who has ever beheld the mark that made me Valor Reborn.
The scar is a splintered web of shattered skin fused together by white, gnarled scars. Its thickest point is between my breasts, at the center of my chest. But it extends to just under my collar bones.
He raises his hand. I don’t stop him. Lucan brushes his fingertips lightly over the lines at my clavicle. I inhale sharply as a jolt passes through me.
He flinches, withdrawing his hand. “Did I hurt you?” I almost grab his fingers to put them back on me.
“No. I… All the scarring feels a bit strange.” It’s true. It’s also a lie.
The skin around the scar is riddled with dead spots—places I don’t feel anything at all or feel less sharply. Other areas, the tissue mended right. It causes an uncomfortable sensation of disappearing and reappearing touch.
But it’s also his touch. It does something to me. Sends a flush underneath my skin. I want him to touch…and keep touching. To run his hand across the scar and underneath my shirt. It’s an urge that I’ve never experienced before, and it’s as thrilling as it is terrifying.
“You can continue,” I manage, wishing I could say the rest. Maybe it’s the hunger making me delusional. Maybe it’s how this whole place feels more desperate by the day.
Lucan’s fingertips glide over my chest, right above my breasts, expanding to make room for his palm. His touch is so searingly hot my lungs ache with every thin, strained breath.
“Did you ever figure out what the light was?” he asks, eyes focused on his hand.
It’s hard to formulate an answer when he’s touching me like this. “No, I didn’t.”
“The light was one of the first things I saw when I came to. I remember it well,” Lucan says softly, lifting his gaze to mine. A shiver races along my spine. He has yet to pull away.
“Me too,” I say softly.
“You honestly don’t know where it came from? It wasn’t a lie you told the vicar?”
“I…” My brows knit, the day fresher in my mind than it has been in years.
“The dragon reached for me, its claw scraping against my chest, and then…light.” I was told later that the light consumed the creature, and it vanished.
A feat of Etherlight unlike anything anyone had ever seen—a feat that was described as similar to the legendary Valor.
“When I woke up next, I was in the Grand Chapel of Mercy being stitched back together by the renewers under Vicar Darius’s control. ”
He nods and shifts his gaze back to my scar. “My consciousness faded in and out, but I was taken alongside you. They noticed me after retrieving you.” Lucan’s fingers press a little more firmly, almost as if he’s trying to touch something within me. “They told me I was alive because of you.”
“I doubt it.”
“I don’t.”
This time, I know it’s not my imagination that we lean in slightly. I want to ask him everything he remembers of that day, everything that happened when I was unconscious, but I doubt he was in the room when the renewers worked to stitch my chest back together.
“Like it or not, Isola, you’re something special,” Lucan whispers.
Mum said I was special, too. Not cursed, but special. The dragon attack, unleashing fire at the sundering pits, my eyes… It’s too much to ignore. Maybe I’m not Valor Reborn, but perhaps I do have a power that can help save this world.
I’ve just opened my mouth to speak when there’s a knock on the door. “It’s me,” Saipha says from the other side.
We both stand, and I hastily tighten the laces on my vest as Lucan opens the door.
Saipha slips inside, stepping around me to stretch out on her bed with a groan as she grabs her stomach.
I don’t think she’s even aware of the motion.
We’re all so exhausted from hunger. “It’s quiet.
I haven’t seen anyone—not even inquisitors—for a good fifteen minutes. If you’re going to go, I’d go now.”
I look to Lucan. He nods.
“Let’s do this,” I say, and we slip out together.
My chest tightens as we walk down the silent hallway, and I’m not sure which terrifies me more right now. The way I can’t stop thinking about the warmth of Lucan’s hand against my chest, or what will happen if we can’t find more food before the next test.