Defy the Void by Isadora Brown

Author:Isadora Brown [Brown, Isadora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Isadora Brown

Chapter Six

I barely slept. Keaton was right next to me, snoring. He slept without a shirt on, his back turned to me in his sleep.

At first, I stared at the ceiling, a smile on my face. I couldn’t contain myself. I was bursting with energy. I wished I could go to Daphne or Mattie about this, but I couldn’t. They weren’t part of this life. And while I knew there was a chance that they’d be happy for me, even after everything that occurred between us, I knew the life I lived now, the fact that I was bonded to Keaton, would never let me go back to my friends the way I knew them. The way they knew me.

Growing bored, I turned towards Keaton, towards his back, and my mouth dropped open.

I couldn’t keep the mangled cry from ripping across my throat, but I managed to slap my hand over my mouth. Hopefully, he didn’t hear it.

His back was mangled in scars. How could I not have noticed when we –

I didn’t want to think about it. The point was, I noticed it now. White lines criss-crossed across the wide expanse of his back. Some were thick and gnarled like the roots of a tree, while others were a ghost of what they had been. Despite the fact that Keaton was a heathen, he carried his scars with him, even in the afterlife.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.

I wished I knew what happened, how he got them. Part of me knew Keaton wasn’t an innocent; he got into scraps and he suffered because of that. But another part of me acknowledged that some of these seemed like tokens of punishment, something that lingered from long before he died.

Before I knew what I was doing, I reached up and traced one across his left shoulder. His skin was warm, despite not being wrapped in a shirt or blanket, and I found myself leaning in to him slightly. And then my mouth was on one, and then another, like I could heal them with a kiss. I wanted to roll my eyes about how stupid that was, but I couldn’t bring myself to.

Because kissing him felt good. And I didn’t want to stop.

When I went in a third time, Keaton shifted. It was only then that I realized his breathing had changed and he wasn’t snoring. Which meant, at some point during my exploration of his body, he woke up.

Slowly, he turned to his other side so he faced me. His eyes were still full of sleep and exhaustion, but the bright green was a shade darker as he looked at me. He said nothing, not even when he reached an arm out and grabbed my hip. His fingers began to tug at the skirt of the nightgown, lifting it up, up, up.

My heart began to hammer against my chest. My mouth went dry. I didn’t stop him, didn’t tell him we should get some sleep. I wasn’t sure why that was.

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