Page 22 of Pretty Savage: Defy

“What?” Now, he’s the one turning himself into a pretzel, trying to see what I’m looking at.

“It—it’s healed,” I stutter out. “There’s no mark on you, just your old scars. It’s like you were never whipped.”

“Oh, yeah.” He shrugs. “They can heal injuries like that. The Fathers and Mothers. They have medicine.”

Medicine. That hiss. The airy spray Thom put on our skin while Carr watched.

I turn my back to Carrson. “What about me? Can you see the marks?”

I shiver when his fingers, rough with calluses from all his training, run down my spine. “There are lines here, but they’re faint,” he says. “Mostly gone.”

I rotate to face him. “Yours are completely gone, vanished.” I look over his chest and face, all unmarked. “Why do you have scars then? If your father could heal you whenever he wanted?”

“That’s what makes it worse.” Bitterness fills his voice. “That he chose to leave them there. Like he wants a constant reminder of how he hurt me.”

I gnaw on the inside of my cheek. If Carr wanted Carrson to remember the pain, why ever heal him at all? Why erase tonight but leave the years before it? And why are Carrson’s wounds completely healed but mine are only partly gone?

“If an animal is hurt, like really badly, what does it do?” I ask Carrson.

He blinks at me. “It runs away from whatever hurt it. Tries to escape.”

“And where does it go?”

“Home,” he says simply.

“I need to see my father.” I turn to face him beneath the wrinkled sheets. “Up in New York. I have to ask him something.”

Carrson doesn’t hesitate, and I love him all the more for it.

“Give me until tonight.” He pauses. “I need to get Ashford House sorted first. Then we’ll go.”

“You’ll come with me?” I’d tried not to get my hopes up. I know all his responsibilities are here, to his fraternity brothers. Even the town and the university depend on him.

“Mouse, you should know.” He gives me a long look. “Where you go, I follow.”

The warm way he says that makes me smile, my cheeks rounding with the motion. I hold on to it for another second before the secret I’ve been carrying presses in hard enough to erase it.

“There’s one thing I haven’t told you. Something you need to know before we go anywhere.”

Carrson turns fully toward me. “What?”

“While you were unconscious, after your father announced our bonding,” I say, forcing myself to keep looking at him, “Jack Beaumont stood up in front of everyone and demanded it be Sealed by Sight.”

“What does that mean?”

I had spent the last few minutes telling myself I needed time to process it before I told him, but there’s no easy way to say these words.

“Carr said that in the early days of The Order, blood and vows weren’t enough to establish a bonding. They wanted proof the couple had completed it.” My fingers find the sheet between us, twisting it around my hand. “Sealed by Sight means The Order witnesses that proof.”

Carrson does not answer at first. His eyes stay on mine, waiting for me to say the part I am trying to make myself say.

“It means we have sex in front of them,” I whisper. “The Mothers and Fathers. The Brothers and Sisters. We do it here at Ashford House.”

For several seconds, he looks like he hasn’t heard me. Then he sits up so quickly that the mattress rocks beneath us.

“No.”

The word comes out flat, bare of any of his usual teasing or warmth.