He catches me looking at him. “What?”

“You really believe that.”

“Sure.” A hint of a smile curves his lips. “I do.”

“Then you mustn’t have done anything really wrong.”

Nothing like I did.

His jaw tenses and his gaze slides off me. In the emerging dawn I see a dimming in the light behind his eyes. “It was wrong.”

“Tell me.” My gaze flicks to his imprint—the dark band with the circled H. We’re talking about this. Finally. About how he got the imprint. “How’d you get the tattoo?”

His eyes fall unerringly back on me, almost as though I compelled him. As though my voice forced him to look at me.

“Tell me,” I repeat, needing to hear this. I’ve waited so long to learn what he did to deserve that—if he did really do anything at all. He had been a child when the Agency imprinted him. Hard to imagine he could have done anything too terrible. Especially then. As good, as honorable, as he is now, how could he have been worse as a boy?

“I was eleven,” he begins, his voice drifting, curling into the brightening air washing over us. “It was before my foster mom took me in, and I was at a home for boys. We slept in a dormitory. I had a top bunk.” He shrugs. “I thought it was cool. Bunk beds, you know.”

I nod.

“I’d been there a few months. I’d moved from a different facility to this new one for older boys,” he continues. “I was still fighting to find my place. Literally, every day. A bunch of us boys beating the piss out of each other.”

“Sounds like a prison movie.”

“Yeah. Not that different. Any time a new kid moved in, the hazing was brutal. Things had finally started to ease up for me, and then this new boy arrived. I can still remember his name. Branson.” Sean expels the name with a heavy breath. “He was about the same age as me but a hell of a lot bigger.”

“Bigger?” I feel my eyebrow wing high. Sean’s no small guy.

“Yeah. I was pretty average for my age then. I shot up six inches the summer before freshman year. But Branson was like a grown man already. The guy had a beard by three p.m.”

I smile a little.

He snorts. “His hazing was brief, of course. No one wanted to take him on. The second day he was there, he decided he wanted my top bunk.” He laughs hoarsely. “He could have picked on one of the others with a top bunk, but no, I was the lucky one.”

His hand moves to my hand resting on the rocky ground between us. His fingers trace a small pattern on the back of it. For once, I don’t shrink from his touch. I’m too engrossed in his story. His words weave around me like a spell.

“I could feel everyone’s eyes on me when he ordered me to switch bunks with him.” His voice drops to a low rumble, and I know he’s back in that moment, living it. “I knew if I let him have that bunk it would—” He shakes his head and makes a small grunt. “They would never let up on me. It would be hazing twenty-four/seven. It would be relentless. Hell.”

“What then?” I prod, desperate to hear more. Desperate also for him to stop, fearful of where he’s going with this.

“Neither one of us were going to back down. So stupid.” He laughs dryly. I’m not sure if he means himself or Branson or the situation in general. “He was trying to drag me off the top bunk. He had me by the ankles, and I just hauled back and kicked him in the face. Hard. As hard as I could. I still had my shoes on, you know.”

My hand turns beneath his, bringing our palms flush together. His skin is warm and solid. I give his fingers a squeeze. It’s all I can do. Maybe just a futile attempt to give comfort. Except he doesn’t need comforting. That’s what he’s saying, anyway. What he wants me to believe. Even if the way his hand clenches mine back says otherwise.

“What happened?” I press.

“He flew backward several feet. I heard the crack of his skull when he hit the floor.” He leans back, dropping on the ground and staring up at the fading night. The stars are still visible, studding the sky. Still holding on to my hand, he drapes his other arm across his forehead. He studies the canopy of stars like it’s a great canvas of art.

“Did he . . .”

“They took him to the hospital. He broke several vertebrae. Concussion. I didn’t see him again after that. I think he was in the hospital for a long time, and he wore a brace afterward . . . at least that’s what I heard.”

“But he could still walk.”

“Eventually.” He nods. “Immediately after that I was imprinted and put in a home for boys with imprints. Met one of my foster brothers there. That’s where Martha found us.”

“It was an accident—” I start to say, and then stop. It’s what he keeps telling me, and each time I never want to hear it. I wet my lips. He probably doesn’t want to hear it, either. “It was just normal boy stuff. Hardly deserving of getting imprinted.”

“And slapping a boy because he was a jerk to you is?”

I flinch at this reminder of Zac. Slapping him had been immature of me, a thoughtless reaction to an ugly situation. A boyfriend turning out to be less than the prince I thought him to be was a crushing blow at the time. And yet slapping him shouldn’t have been a crime. It shouldn’t have gotten me marked for life.

“I don’t kid myself. If Branson had been someone important—not another carrier—I would have ended up in jail. I’d probably still be there.”