Page 30 of The Shape of my Scar (The Unbroken #1)

O ne afternoon, Jac arrived.

Faolan had started slowly and painfully getting about with support. He had been avoiding her, she suspected.

He stood there with his eyes red and a box of her favourite biscuits.

He took one look at her in the bed and seemed to struggle to keep the tears in.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Jac,” she muttered.

She reached out with her one good arm and gave him a lopsided, awkward hug. “I’m alive. Don’t make a fuss.”

He hugged her tighter, sniffling. “You bloody maniac. You nearly died.”

“You kept me alive until help came. If we rescued those kids, it was worth it.”

“You’re the stupidest genius I’ve ever worked with.”

“I am not a genius; I just remember a lot of stuff,” she whispered.

Thane was there again—still not speaking, still not inside the room.

But his eyes fixed on her and Jac like he was watching something he didn’t quite understand…

or didn’t like. The intensity in his stare only sharpened when she rested her head against Jac’s shoulder for a moment.

When she looked up, it looked like he was about to come charging in before he changed his mind and stomped off.

Faolan wasn’t to know that later that day, Jac found himself cornered near the car park.

Thane stood just a little too close, towering over his smaller frame. His voice was low and tight. “You two…you’re close,” he ground out.

Jac raised a wary brow. “We’ve worked together for years. She’s like a sister to me.”

Thane’s eyes narrowed. “Right.”

Jac’s lips twitched. “Don’t worry. It’s not like that. I’m gay, mate.”

Thane’s face changed—surprise, followed by something like relief.

Jac leaned in a little, his tone cool. “If you care about her, then don’t mess this up. Because if you hurt her again, gay or not, I will make your life hell. You can’t treat her like before.”

Thane didn’t respond for a beat.

“You don’t know what you are talking about. I would tear my bloody heart out for her.”

Then he stepped back, nodded once, and disappeared down the hallway.

It started with the sound of metal.

A sharp clang, distant and echoing, like the slam of a weapon’s bolt.

Faolan was back there again. A dim hallway, the red carpet fraying underfoot. Cigarette smoke in the air and a man’s shadow stretching down the corridor toward her, long and slow and silent.

She was six.

Then twenty-six.

The sound of gunfire cracked through the dark like the shatter of plates across a kitchen floor.

Someone screamed. It was her voice. And then again, hoarser, shaped like the breath she had spent behind a muzzle or a hospital tube.

Someone gripped her arm. She jerked away. Pain lanced through her chest. Blood was on the walls

“Please,” she whimpered, backing into the edge of the cot.

A boy’s laugh, sharp and familiar. A bang.

Then the room filled with light.

White, clinical, too bright.

She gasped awake, her heart battering against her ribs like it was trying to escape her body.

Her mouth opened on a silent sob

And he was there.

Thane was bent over her, too close. His hands braced on either side of the bed, knuckles white against the edge of the frame. One hand reached toward her, then stopped mid-air, trembling.

Those eyes.That impossible mismatch—hazel with flecks of green, and the other a vivid, unreal blue.

His face was pale, lips parted like he’d been about to speak.

“Faolan,” he breathed, voice thick and ragged with emotion.

Then, quieter, more broken, “Dory… please.”

She flinched.

No one had called her that in years…not since she’d buried it in a file labelled things that hurt too much to think about.

The world tilted sideways.

She could feel the hospital again now—the pulse monitor clipped to her finger, the rough sheet beneath her hips, the ache where her ribs knitted slowly beneath her skin. The night nurse stood next to Thane, as if afraid to approach.

Her chest rose and fell too fast. The line between nightmare and reality smudged like charcoal. She saw the man in front of her, the one who had pulled her out of her nightmare. And she didn’t know whether to reach for him or scream.

He noticed.

He stepped back, pain flickering across his face. “I shouldn’t have…fuck. I’m sorry, I just… You were thrashing, and I thought you couldn’t breathe.”

He was still reaching. Not touching. Hovering.

“Don’t touch me,” she whispered.

But it came out fractured, weak.

Thane’s breath caught, and his hands fell away. His jaw tightened, and for a second, he looked like the Thane she used to know. The one who talked to her through a hole in the wall, silent but loyal. The one who kept her hoping. The one who never came back.

That boy was gone.

But some part of him still lived in his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. Then he turned and walked out, every step a visible fight to keep from looking back.

She sat frozen long after he had turned the corner.

And when the nurse came in later, adjusting her IV and offering her tea, Faolan simply asked, voice steady, “Can you make sure no one visits after ten?”