Page 13 of Fall Before Her Throne

“Sempre e per sempre.”

We parted ways on the stairs. After a deep, steeling breath, I quietly slipped through the door to his room. Max slept on the bed, lying on his stomach with his head on the pillow and his hands stuffed somewhere underneath it. The giant comforter—a little outdated in style but still clean-looking—tangled around his legs.

Another item on the to-do list? New bedding.

I glanced at the chair Cas must have been sitting in on the far side of the bed, and I took a step forward to sit in it for a while, but my eyes caught on Max’s back.

I sucked in a breath as my eyes went wide.

His entire back was exposed. Shirtless. A wide expanse of muscle stretched between his shoulder blades, with bandages wrapped across his middle to cover up the wound on his side.

But that wasn’t what caught my attention and set my heart racing. It wasn’t what had my hands fisting into the covers at the foot of the bed.

His back was completely covered with a tattoo.

A full-maned lion, framed by red roses, yet partially obscured by bandages.

Leona. My name meant lioness in Italian.

This was a lion. A lion.

It couldn’t mean what I thought it meant. It couldn’t be my namesake on his back.

“What…” I mumbled as I stumbled around the bed and collapsed into the chair.

Roses that looked exactly like the ones our mothers grew together, and that he gave me every single year on my birthday. The lion’s face seemed sad and in pain, yet it held its chin upward in determination.

My chest was cavernous. How long had Max had it? Did Cas know?

Was that why he said I should sit with Max?

I stared at all the details of that tattoo while Max slept soundly for a full thirty minutes. Finally, he stirred on the bed. His head popped up with a groan, his sandy blond hair askew in all directions. He looked around the room while he groggily pushed himself to a seated position, grimacing and cursing in pain.

“Lay down,” I murmured. From my position in the chair on the far side of the bed, he hadn’t yet seen me. “Stop moving so much.”

His back went ramrod straight. I could practically see the hair on the back of his neck rise.

“Fuck,” he whispered.

“Yeah.” It was the only response I had.

His palm braced against his side. Perhaps absentmindedly, his hand felt his back to find it bare. His muscles expanded and contracted while he sucked in a breath and slowly turned, scooting himself up on the bed to stare at me. He rested his back against the headboard while I tried to keep my eyes from roaming over the ridges of his abs.

I hadn’t seen him shirtless since…I couldn’t remember the last time. Probably when we were kids, playing in the slip and slide in his parents’ backyard during the summer.

It had been a long time since then.

“Care to tell me about the tattoo on your back?”

He dragged a hand down his face to rub the sleep from the corners of his eyes, flinching at the black and blue swelling. Beneath the injuries, his face looked the same, but different. A transformed Max, brought low by the agony of a busted face.

“Not really, no.”

His voice was gravelly. I handed him the glass of water Cas had left on the end table. He drank the entire thing.

“Tell me.”

“It’s just a tattoo,” he said quietly while placing the glass down and avoiding my stare. “It means nothing.”