Out of the Dark (The Brethren Series) by Sara Reinke

night before, but obviously her plans had changed.
    Or maybe not so obviously, she thought, because she’d tried to politely explain her absence to him on the phone earlier that morning—after he’d left a half-dozen or more messages for her throughout the entire night. “My grandfather’s fallen ill,” she’d told him, not a complete lie. “He’s in the ICU right now and they don’t know if he’s going to make it.”
    To which Davone had supplied, by way of sympathy : “Damn, girl, that’s some shit right there.”
    She wasn’t fucking him for his empathetic skills.
    God, she thought, as Davone’s call rolled over to her voice mail. Already she could see she had three waiting from him, messages he’d left in rapid succession over the last hour and a half. She was definitely going to have to find a way to let the kid down easily—but down just the same. And soon.
    From the couch, Aaron uttered a soft groan in her sleep. He’d slumped sideways, letting his cheek settle against the seat of the sofa while his feet remained dangling over the side in a seated posture.
    Amnesia, she thought in dismay. He can’t remember me…or anything else. It’s like none of it ever happened to him. Again, she thought of Augustus’ admonition, the unexpected truth she’d come to realize in his words:
    Whatever your past connection to that man at the clinic, it is long over with and done . There will be no resurrecting or salvaging it.
    No matter what, even with the revelation of his lost memories, Naima couldn’t accept that the Aaron she had known was gone. Memories don’t define a person’s character, their soul, she thought. I refuse to believe he’s changed inside. That the man I knew is gone forever. I can’t accept that. I won’t.
    As she crept past the sofa on her way to the kitchen, she noticed the hem of Aaron’s black T-shirt had pulled loose from his pants, riding up to reveal bare skin beneath. His hips had pivoted enough for her to see part of his flank, as well as his abdomen, and she paused.
    What is that? she wondered, because she could see some kind of mark on his skin. At first, she didn’t recognized what it was, because it was something that, as a Brethren, she’d never seen on herself or any of her kin—except for once, on Brandon Noble, and his throat had been cut when he’d been too young to fully heal from the wound. But when she leaned over the side of the couch and very carefully so as not to disturb Aaron, drew the bottom of his shirt up to expose more of his back, she realized.
    Scars.
    What the…? Her frown deepened as Naima leaned further over, tugging against his shirt, pulling it up toward his sternum. Even from her limited vantage, she could see Aaron’s back was riddled with overlapping, twisting marks of pinkish-silver stripes—hundreds of scars. Although she didn’t need much by way of imagination to realize how Aaron had come by them, it was beyond her comprehension to consider justhow many times he must have been beaten—and how severely—to have overwhelmed his naturally heightened healing capabilities enough to scar.
    “Oh, my God,” she whispered in aghast.
    It’s alright.
    She remembered Aaron whispering this. In her mind, she could see him before her, no more than a foot away, close enough for her to feel each ragged intake and exhalation of exhausted breath against her face. He’d been a young man, nineteen or twenty, his body lean and strapped with muscles, his skin glossed with sweat. They were naked, but there was nothing sexual about it, despite their proximity.
    It’s alright.
    She remembered Aaron whispering this. They had been bound to what Lamar Davenant had called “the tree.” It had looked like a diminutive gallows to Naima, set on a broad, wheeled base so that he could move it anywhere in the library he’d wished. A pulley mechanism had been crafted into the device—because apparently Lamar had an eye and mind for that sort of engineering—so