Page 302 of From Rakes to Riches

How did Gabriel come to be without a large portion of his nose? How was it that his ocular bone had split so completely as to cave in, leaving him unable to properly open his left eye? How had the skin of his cheek ripped all the way through, from the corner of his mouth to his temple, only to be stitched together by a drunken hack?

“Violence.” Sitting on the surgeon’s examination table, Gabriel gave the same short answer he always did. The truth, and yet...

Not all of it. Not even close.

The memory—memorieswere Raphael’s absolute worst.

And it hadn’t even happened to him.

The violence.

Dr. Conleith reached for the stark-white-bulbed lamp, pulling it closer to Gabriel’s face. It illuminated the macabre smile crafted by the tight, uneven line of the scar branching from the corner of his mouth to his hairline.

Raphael could barely stand to look at it, even after all these years.

He wanted to strike the handsome doctor for pointing such glaring lights on the ancient wounds when he knew how it distressed his brother. His fingers itched to bloody thestern brow that furrowed with pity as he bent over Gabriel’s expressionless, long-suffering face.

It was the tension bulging his brother’s muscles and the trickle of sweat running from his shorn scalp into the back of his collar that brought out the instinct to break the doctor’s strong jaw as it flexed and released, as if chewing on a thought.

Must it be so light in here?

They visited under the cover of night so as not to be so thusly exposed.

As if he could instinctively sense the rage simmering right beneath Raphael’s skin, the doctor glanced over to where he lingered by an articulated skeleton, holding the wall up with his shoulder.

To Conleith’s credit, he didn’t seem cowed by the brothers Sauvageau in the least. “I ask not out of morbid curiosity, but occupational necessity,” he explained with his very professional brand of patience. “It appears to me that some of these wounds sustained subsequent trauma, which makes my job a great deal more difficult.”

Subsequent trauma, what a gentle way to put it.

Neither he nor Gabriel answered.

Dr. Conleith rubbed at his close-cropped beard, one with a more russet hue than his tidy brown hair. “Answer me this, then. In regard to the ocular cavity, this was done by an instrument, I suspect?”

“It was.”

“Blunt or sharp-edged?”

“Sharp.” Gabriel’s words were often difficult to mark. His voice hailed from lower in a chest deeper than most men could boast. Protected by dense ribs and muscles built upon what seemed to be other muscle, the register was often so low as to be lost.

The reason they often created the fiction that Gabriel couldn’t speak or understand English was twofold. One, because people spoke more freely around someone who might not mark them.

And the other, because speaking caused Gabriel discomfort.

The stitching done to his mouth and cheek had been of such terrible design, it’d taken the ability to part his lips very well without fear of tearing the wound anew.

“So sharp, but not as sharp as the instrument that tore the cheek open, is that correct?” The doctor used his thumbs to lift the lip up toward the exposed nasal cavity.

Gabriel, a man who’d undergone more pain than even Raphael could imagine, gave a grunt of discomfort.

Raphael pushed away from the wall, taking a threatening step toward the doctor, who’d turned his back.

His brother held out a staying hand, planting Raphael’s feet to the floor.

“I’m sorry for any discomfort,” the doctor said gently as he released Gabriel’s face and stepped away to wash his hands. “I was testing the elasticity of the skin.”

“It was lumber.”

Conleith turned around, his hands frozen with suds, as if he’d not heard Gabriel correctly. “Pardon?”

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