Shane (Damage Control 4)

“Very bad.”

“Is that why you have the dreamcatchers?” The earring, and the one tattooed on his muscular stomach.

He nods.

“Do they work?”

He shakes his head.

His nightmares are too bad and too real. He doesn’t say it, but I hear it anyway.

He cups my cheek and something scrapes on it. I put my hand over it, tug his off and turn it over to examine his palm.

A cut, half-scabbed over, a bead of bright fresh blood seeping at one end. “When did this happen? It’s fresh.” I glance up, and his expression is shutting down. “When I was going down on you. When you reached into the bedside table. What…?”

Then I see the small object on top of the quilt. A tiny thing, broken and uneven, its yellow plastic dyed red on one side.

We make a grab for it at the same time, and I’m a nanosecond faster because it’s in my hand. He sighs as I unfurl my fingers and look at it.

“A pencil sharpener?”

“It’s what I could find on short notice.”

“Why would you need…?” I bite my lip, think back on the moment. He’d stilled, fallen quiet, his body tensing, I remember. Then he’d taken this thing from the drawer, and he’d come back to life. “The pain.”

A scowl, his customary expression, tightens his fine features, but he says nothing.

“Did you feel it?” I ask, and he lifts a brow. He’s not making it any easier. Maybe he doesn’t know how. “Were you about to have a flashback?” I consider my own question as he struggles with it, rolling away from me, his jaw working. “Can you tell when you’re about to have one?”

He scoots up until he’s sitting, his back to the headboard. His hair falls in his face. “Sometimes I know,” he whispers.

“Like this time?”

Another nod. “Voices. Smells. And I feel cold. Numb.” He rubs his chest, leans his head back, observing me from under his dark lashes. “Dead.”

The word makes me wince. I can see the scars on his wrists in the low light of his bedside lamp, and familiar dread stirs inside me.

It’s not the same, I tell myself. Not the same as Angel. Angel didn’t make it. Angel didn’t stop trying to die. Shane’s scars are old. He survived. He went on living—and hasn’t tried to die since then.

Right?

“Tell me about these.” I scoot up until I’m sitting beside him and pull the covers over our legs.

Taking his hand in mine, I turn it over, exposing the ink and the scar on his wrist. If he wants, he can pull his hand away, I think, and when he doesn’t, a tiny thrill goes through me—both excitement and foreboding.

“There was a time,” he starts but stops abruptly. He looks down, stares hard at my hand locked around his wrist. I resist the urge to run my fingers over the scar, and the smaller one crisscrossing it. “A bad time. When I thought there was no way out.”

“In prison?”

A tiny flinch, quickly suppressed. “Yeah.”

“But you don’t want that now.” I swallow, something twisting in my chest. “You don’t want to die anymore, do you?”

I need to hear it from him. Because if he still wants to die, then I don’t know if I can help him. Don’t know if I can take it.

Not again.

His fingers curl inward, and I slide my hand down, over his rough palm. He’s silent and for a while I think he won’t answer me. That scares me. It’s almost an answer itself if he doesn’t.