Shattered (The Protectors 11)

As badly as I needed answers from him, I needed something else more. I stood and covered his hand with mine. He let me link our fingers and when I urged him to stand, he did. I led him to the single bedroom in the cabin. When I flipped the light switch on, it turned on the small lamp on the nightstand. I left Caleb to stand next to the bed as I stripped off the dusty quilt covering the top of it. I urged him to sit and stripped off his shoes and hoodie, then murmured, “Lie down.”

He did as I asked and immediately closed his eyes the second his head hit the pillow. I worked off my own jacket and shoes and went around to the other side of the bed. I put my gun on the nightstand and then got into bed with him. He didn’t resist when I looped my arm over his waist. We lay there for several minutes, but I knew he wasn’t asleep. I could feel it in the way he held his frame rigid against mine.

“Did you kill them?” he finally asked, his voice low and barely audible.

“No,” I said, because I knew who he was talking about. “Only flesh wounds. They’ll be okay.”

I felt, rather than heard, his sigh of relief.

“Who is he, Caleb?” I asked.

When Caleb didn’t respond, I fought back the bite of frustration that went through me. Two years earlier when I’d met him, Caleb had trusted me with anything and everything. As much as I’d known it wasn’t healthy for him to put so much faith in me so soon after meeting, a part of me had wanted to nurture that emotion, to see it grow and flourish.

And I hadn’t just wanted that for him.

I’d wanted it for me, too.

“I shot two cops today, Caleb. For you. We may never be able to go back to the way things were… do you understand that? As soon as that guy tells the cops who you are—”

“He won’t,” Caleb whispered.

“Won’t what?”

“Tell them who I am.”

His comment caught me off guard. “Caleb—”

“You lied to me, Jace,” Caleb murmured. “You said everything would be okay.”

Caleb shifted away from me, then made a move to get up. I used the hand I had at his waist to reach down and grab his right arm, which he was gripping the edge of the bed with so he could lever himself off it. As I closed my fingers around his forearm, his sleeve rode up and I automatically slid my hand farther up his arm. “Caleb,” I began, but stopped abruptly when my fingers registered what I was feeling.

Raised skin.

Lots of it.

I held my breath as I moved my fingers enough so I could see what I knew had to be some kind of mistake.

It had to be a mistake.

It wasn’t.

I was left completely dumbstruck as I stared at the dozens of scars on the inside of Caleb’s forearm.

Perfectly uniform scars that couldn’t have found their way onto his skin in any kind of accidental fashion.

No.

I wasn’t sure if I said the word out loud or not, but it didn’t matter. Caleb pulled his arm free of my hold and rubbed it against the bed so the sleeve slipped back down. He didn’t look at me as he whispered a handful of words that left me feeling completely shattered.

“Everything’s not okay, Jace.”

Chapter 2

Caleb

I was so cold.

Even with Jace at my back, I was cold.

That had never happened before.

It should have been unsettling, but it actually made me feel better in a way. It meant I could not feel for a little while longer.

I liked not feeling.

It made things easier.

I’d felt a little yesterday when Jace had shown up at the motel, but that had been my own fault for going there in the first place.

For waiting for him to come, like I’d known he would. I should have just stuck to the plan.

I wanted to laugh because plan made it sound like I knew what the hell I was doing. Like I had some reasonable hope of finding that one magic thing that would just fix everything in my life… fix me.

For a while, I’d thought it was Jace, and I’d clung to that for a really long time.

Too long.

I’d honestly believed what he’d told me – that if I just hung in there long enough, things would get better. I’d had this ridiculous vision of getting to the point where I was a normal guy and I’d show up on Jace’s doorstep one day to show him I was worthy of someone like him. That I was no longer the kid who’d let his own father fuck him for years. That I wasn’t the coward who’d watched his brother die and kept his mouth shut about the how and the why of his death.