She sucked in a breath. He didn’t remember. She wanted to lift her hair and bare her neck. She wanted to show him how she had been hurt; to show him not simply the physical scar but the way Chandra’s cruelties large and small had flayed her sense of self, until she was raw, a furious tangle of nerves, until she was forced to build herself armor, jagged and cruel, to be able to survive. But he would not understand. He had never understood. Her hurts and her terrors, which had consumed her all her life, had always been small to him. He had either never truly seen them or simply, easily forgotten
...more
