You know I have a secret. A terrible secret. You can’t imagine the depth of it. The scope of it. You don’t know who I am … what I’ve become. To tell you would be the end of me. Mena’s words haunted Liam as he stomped around his private room at St. Margaret’s Royal Hospital. He did things to my body, to my soul. I let him. I had to. She’d had to let him because she’d been fucking married to him. His head pounded every time he stood upright. His shoulder burned like someone persisted in needling him with a branding iron, even though his left arm had been secured to his chest with a sling. He had enough thread in his hairline and his chest to stitch a quilt. But none of that mattered. It barely registered. His wounds were more annoyance than pain. They slowed him down when there was so much to be done. Everything had been ripped open and was falling apart, and he needed to be out there triaging the bleeding damage, not holed up here like a goddamned invalid. Just when Liam had been certain Jani had become family rather than foe, the boy had chosen the worst possible moment to exact his revenge.
