Page 47 of Broken

He’s crouching in front of me, and his expression is concerned now. The rage has gone and his worry is a balm to my soul.

“You’re ill?—”

“I’m not sick,” I counter, unsurprised that he knows about my illness. I feel like everyone does.

His knuckles hesitantly rub over my crown. “The first time I landed in Rome when I was transferred here, I saw on the news that you’d been operated on.” His jaw works. “You have beautiful hair. An angel’s hair.”

The admission, torn from him as it is, sinks into me like stones slipping through water. Not only his choice of words but that, on his first day here, he saw me on TV.

Fate... yet again.

Could it be more obvious?

Our first face-to-face meeting.

My tongue feels thick in my mouth. “Iam an angel.”

I’m not sure why I say that. I never intended to, but the words slipped out, just like everything else I’ve said or done tonight.

He frowns, then his fingers trace along the part of gelled hair which I use to control how much of the scars are visible. That he touches me in such an intimate spot doesn’t seem to register.

It isn’t the touch someone gives a stranger, and while I know that’s because we’renotstrangers, he doesn’t. Yet he touches me like he knows me.

Because he does.

He just doesn’t realize it.

“The cyst?” he asks simply.

“The cyst.” I tip my chin up. “They say it caused delusions.”

“But you don’t?”

“No, I know my purpose. Even if I’m the only one who does.”

“Are you physically well since—I mean, should you be out and traveling if…?”

“I discharged myself.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I’m as well as I can be. But the truth is, being in the hospital would have been detrimental to me. I’m a nomad. I travel around a lot. Being stuck in there was sucking the life out of me.”

“If you needed to be there, then you shouldn’t have left,” he chides, and I shiver when his fingers collide with a scar.

It isn’t sensitive.

If anything, it’s still numb, but I can feel him. Touching me.

Finally.

I tip my head toward him, letting the curve of my skull rest on his hand.

“I’m as well as I can be,” I repeat.

“You almost collapsed?—”

“I tried to keep up with you. I failed,” I tell him dryly. “I exerted myself too much. Plus, before that, I followed Paolo.”

---