Alex's POV
I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I kept telling myself I was seeing it wrong, that the light was playing tricks, and that a person’s body shouldn’t look like that, but the longer I looked, the more it sank in. It was real. Every line, every mark, and every ugly memory written across his skin was very real.
My throat burned. Tears crawled up behind my eyes, hot and useless, but I forced them back down because I hadn’t even heard the story yet, about the huge scar running down the middle of Jaxon’s chest, about the pills he kept hiding, about why he’d sounded like he was suffocating in his sleep. I didn’t have the right to cry before I listened.
It wasn’t just that one scar, either. That long, raised line in the center of him hurt the most to look at, but there were hundreds of ot
