Page 65

“It is,” he agreed. “It was my mother’s. She gave it to me when I first joined the training ranks of the Zabrian Guard.”

I craned my neck to look back at him. His eyes were orange once more.

“Are you still close?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “Neither of my parents have spoken to me since the scandal that sent me here.”

I clenched my molars together to keep my mouth from dropping open. I’d never had parents. But to think that you could have parents somewhere out there, parents who’d once loved you, who’d raised you, who would completely give up on you like that…

It hurt.

I was hurting for him.

When you’re hurting, you tell your warden

I tightened my jaw and didn’t say a word.

“I thought about getting rid of it after I was sent here,” he said, studying the white-and-gold material of the comb. “It didn’t really seem right to keep it, considering that it was a gift for entering the Zabrian Guard which I had then been ejected from. But…” His free hand coasted over the rough surface of my hair. “I am very glad I kept it now.”

“You are?”

“I am. And I am even, I must say, a little bit glad you got caught in the brambles this morning, Tasha.”

“What?” I asked with a bout of surprised laughter. “Why?”

His response made the laughter die in my throat.

“Because,” he said in a low voice, “I’ve been wanting to comb this beautiful hair from the very first day I met you.”

“You… What?”

“Technically the first night,” he amended, gently gathering all my hair together in one hand. “In the spare bedroom at Fallon’s ranch. When I watched you take those pins out of your hair. It spilled all over your shoulders. Just so astoundingly beautiful. I was dying to touch it.”

He’d wanted to touch me that very first night. He wasdyingto…

“You think my hair is beautiful?”

“Any fool with eyes would think so,” he answered with a slightly sarcastic click of his tongue, like I’d asked a very silly question. Then, quietly, so quietly I almost missed it, “Your hair is not the only part.”

Not the only part, what? Not the only part he’d wanted to touch that night?

Not the only part he thought was beautiful?

My heart rose to my throat, where it lodged painfully. Tenn didn’t say anything else, instead getting to work on my hair.

He combed my hair the same way he sewed my clothes. Competently, thoroughly.

Carefully.

And it felt so fucking good. So good it made me want to lean further back towards him, to cry, to run. Having his strong hands gently tugging apart my tangled strands, to feel him work the comb along my scalp and through the ends, felt like it was ripping something inside me open and healing it at the same time.

No one else had combed my hair for me since I was eight. After Angela left, my guardians in the system cut it short so that no one would have to deal with it. It was part of the reason I wore it so long now as an adult. To take back a little bit of control, to assert myself over at least that part of my body, my life.

I would have let him cut it.

But he’d refused. He’d taken the longer path, the path which involved so much more work. The painstaking path that involved combing every twig and bramble out from my hair.

I was feeling fewer and fewer tugs now. The comb was gliding, smooth and easy, through my tresses.