The Burn Scars

Marlo

The sharp crack of shattering glass still echoed in my ears as Jarrah tackled me to the floor. Glass rained down like heavy hail, stinging my cheeks and burying itself in the carpet around us. Before I could even scream, his massive arm wrapped around my waist, dragging me across the floor of the VIP suite and shoving me through the heavy service door into the stairwell.

We hit the cold concrete stairs running.

Jarrah didn't say a word. His hand was a vice grip around my wrist, pulling me down three flights of stairs into the arena. He slammed the heavy steel locker room door shut behind us, shoved the master lock into place, and backed us deep into the windowless room where no sniper scope could reach.

The silence down here was deafening.

My heart hammered against my ribs so hard my chest physically throbbed. I backed away from him until my knees hit one of the long benches. The police evidence tag the piece of paper identifying Cal O'Shea’s blood stained glove was crumpled tight inside my sweating fist.

"Who was that?" I gasped, my lungs burning as I fought for air. "Was that Siobhan's man? Or was that Cal?"

Jarrah didn't answer. He stood in the middle of the empty locker room, his massive chest rising and falling violently. His hair was soaked with sweat and flecks of broken glass. The dark red practice jersey hung heavily over his massive shoulder pads, smelling of cold sweat and damp ice.

"Answer me!" I yelled, my voice cracking under the sheer weight of terror and exhaustion. "You dragged me down here! You trapped me in this school! If people are shooting through five inch glass, I deserve to know who is trying to put a bullet in my head!"

Jarrah slowly raised his hands to the hem of his dark red jersey. His knuckles were raw, split open from slamming into the VIP suite wall earlier.

"Nobody was shooting at you," Jarrah rasped, his voice low and ragged.

"What?"

"The angle of the shot was three inches above your head," he said, pulling the heavy jersey over his head and tossing it onto the floor. "It was a warning. A message from Cal to tell me I'm spending too much time keeping you alive."

My body went numb. Cal. The same man who smiled at me by the ice rink and offered me a paper cup of coffee had just fired a high caliber round inches from my skull.

Jarrah reached for the straps of his heavy shoulder pads, unbuckling the hard plastic shell with sharp, angry jerks. He let the pads crash to the rubber floor mats with a heavy thud. Underneath, he wore a thin, grey compression shirt soaked in sweat.

He unzipped the collar of the compression shirt and peeled it up over his head, wringing the fabric out in his fists.

I turned my head away, pressing my thumb into my temple to stop the sudden, blinding headache coming on. "I can't do this anymore, Jarrah. I can't live like this. You have secrets. Cal has secrets. And I'm stuck in the middle of a war I don't even understand"

"Look at me, Marlo," Jarrah commanded softly.

"No."

"Look at me."

His voice wasn't angry this time. It was flat, hollow, and completely stripped of his usual arrogant dominance.

I slowly turned my head back toward him.

Jarrah was standing with his back turned to me, facing the tall metallic lockers. The harsh overhead fluorescent light shone straight down onto his bare skin.

The breath was instantly ripped from my throat.

The entire expanse of his broad back was a ruined, horrific landscape of thick, silver-white burn scars. They stretched from the base of his hair line, across his wide shoulder blades, and poured down his spine like melted candle wax, twisting violently around his ribs. The smooth, tan skin of his arms stopped abruptly where the thick, puckered scar tissue took over.

It wasn't a knife wound. It wasn't a bullet graze.

Half of his upper body had been literally consumed by an inferno.

I froze, my fingers loosening around the crumpled evidence tag until it dropped to the floor. The locker room seemed to tilt on its axis. My mind went entirely blank, swallowed whole by the sheer, brutal sight of his ruined skin.

"Jarrah" I whispered, the word escaping my lips before I could stop it.

I took a slow, hesitant step forward. My boots made no sound on the rubber matting. I had spent ten years hating this man, fearing him, viewing him as an invincible, cold blooded monster who stalked my every move. But standing behind him, staring at the raw, permanent pain etched into his body, the monster vanished.

In his place was a man who had survived hell.

"You think I'm an assassin, don't you?" Jarrah spoke into the quiet room, his back still turned to me. His shoulder blades twitched as he took a deep, painful breath. "You found those letters. You saw J.V. on the wire transfer from ten years ago, and you assumed I took Siobhan's money to put your parents in the ground."

My throat was so dry I couldn't form a sentence. I just stared at the deep, twisted ridge of scar tissue near his left shoulder blade.

"I was fifteen years old, Marlo," Jarrah said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly soft rumble. He slowly turned around to face me. The burn scars wrapped around his side, eating into the muscle of his chest. His amber eyes were completely dark, filled with an ancient, unbearable grief that made my chest physically ache.

"I didn't take Siobhan's money to kill your parents," Jarrah whispered, stepping closer until he was standing right in front of me. The heat radiating off his scarred skin washed over my face. "I was inside that house before the fire started. Siobhan locked the doors from the outside and set the gasoline."

He leaned down, bringing his face inches from mine. His thumb slowly reached out, gently touching the edge of my jaw, his calloused skin rough against my cold face.

"I didn't get these scars in a fight, little bird," Jarrah whispered, his voice cracking with a raw emotion I had never heard from him before. "I got these pulling a screaming, seven year old girl out of a burning bedroom in Melbourne while her world melted around her."

A sudden, violent pain exploded behind my eyes.

The quiet locker room vanished. The smell of bleach and sweat was instantly replaced by the suffocating, bitter stench of thick black smoke and burning wood.

A bedroom. Red flames roaring up the wallpaper. The sound of a little girl crying under a heavy wooden beam.

And a boy a teenage boy with bloody hands and burning clothes reaching through the fire, screaming my name.

My knees completely gave out beneath me.