wanted to help.”
He nods stiffly. “I felt like a burden. Guy’s birthday was coming up—he was turning fourteen—and I wanted him to feel good. Happy. Something, at least, that wasn’t desperation or worry or bloody despair.”
It takes everything in me not to ask why they were in Paris in the first place. Had their mother been able to work, despite her being ill? Had she received a work transfer? Or had something happened here in London—maybe even regarding their father’s death—that led them across the channel and into France?
I sit on my hands, as though that’ll also keep my mouth shut from being a nosy busybody.
The car veers to the right, across an intersection. It’s so dark out that I don’t recognize any landmarks. If this had been last week, after the protest at Buckingham Palace, I for sure would have thought Saxon Priest was leading me to my death.
“I thought steak would do the trick,” he says, straightening out the car. “Not that we had the money.”
“Did you work for it?”
His mouth curls bitterly. “No, Isla, I stole it.”
Oh.
Pity swims with horror at what he’d clearly gone through at such a young age. While I’d been playing with dolls and scampering around Yorkshire with my parents, he’d been fighting for his livelihood, right alongside his brothers.
“There was this one butcher who hung the meat at the front of the store, just inside the window. I must have heard Guy mention a thousand times how tempting it was to just slip inside and snag one off the hooks.”
My heart pulls. “Saxon . . .”
“I was ten and so not exactly the brightest chap.”
“You were a child.”
“I went for it,” he says, shortly, combing his fingers through his hair. He pauses behind his ear, rubbing the skin there, then drops his hand to the steering wheel again. “I waited until noon, when I knew there’d be a rush, and then I made my move. I wasn’t stealthy. Hell, I could barely reach the meat without climbing up on a chair, I was so short back then. It was a doomed mission from beginning to end.”
“The butcher caught you.”
It’s not a question, and Saxon doesn’t treat it as one.
“The butcher caught me,” he echoes, the impassiveness that I despise seeping into each syllable, “and then he gave me this.”
He runs his tongue along his scarred, upper lip.
“No.” A shudder tears through me. “How could he do that? And to a child, no less? There are so many laws against—”
“I stole from him, Isla.”
“This isn’t the blasted Middle Ages, Saxon! Grown men can’t just go around deforming ten-year-olds because they stole a slab of—” I clap a hand over my mouth as my brain goes into high alert. Deformed. Oh, shite. Shite! “I didn’t mean to say that,” I utter hastily, feeling the guilt creep in. Here he is opening a piece of himself to me and I’ve gone ahead and called him deformed. Especially when that isn’t at all how I think of him. “That wasn’t the right word. You aren’t—”
“If you think it’s a sight now, then imagine how much worse it was then. I made Damien cry.”
“Saxon, I’m so sorry. That isn’t at all what I meant; you have to believe me.”
“Just a slip of the tongue.”
“No,” I breathe, regret pinching my lungs, “not that, either. You aren’t deformed. We all carry burdens, scars. Mine are here”—I touch my heart, wishing I could unload all of my secrets so I wouldn’t need to carry their weight alone—“and yours are visible. But it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.”
He slows the car, parking in front of a charming, brick, Victorian terrace home. Three stories tall. A garden encased by a cast-iron fence. It’s all I take note of before Saxon snags my attention again: “Anyone who dares to ask what happened usually gets the gift of a fist in their face.”
Slowly, I meet his stare, fully aware of the tangible current humming between us. The back of my neck tingles. “I demanded that you tell me something.”
“I told you out of my own free will.”
“Earlier, you said that you’d steal that from me, too.”
Holding my gaze, he brings his thumb up to his mouth. Traces the calloused pad over the smooth contour of his perfect, bottom lip, then arches north, to where his upper lip hitches, permanently set in place like he’s perpetually angry and out for blood. “If you haven’t noticed,” he murmurs, “I’ve made a habit out of