I've Been There Before

His slender fingers touched the scar.

He could feel the unevenness.

It felt like his fingers were burned as he touched it.

“When it comes to a broken body like this, how could you torture her?” Humbert was still on the phone with his half-taunting tone.

But Caden ignored his teasing as his thumb caressed the scar. Suddenly, he did something so strange to her that he covered it with his palm.

Staring at his palm, he didn’t know what he was doing.

Hearing no voice, Humbert thought Caden had hung up on him.

But he didn’t end the call as he picked up a cigarette and lit it to savor the taste of Nicotine, while Caden said unassumingly, “It’s longer than my palm.”

“What?” Humbert paused a beat before figuring it out. “You mean Grace’s scar on her waist?” Humbert understood him as they had been best friends for so long.

“Even longer than your hand?” Humbert sucked up hard on his cigarette before bubbling a smokey circle.

“Which implies her surgeon was really inexperienced, so terrible that…

Well, when I was in the medical college, our teacher let us remove the human specimen’s kidneys for the first time, but we made the scar much smaller than Grace’s.”

“What do you mean?”

“It means, perhaps…No, it’s certain that her surgeon doesn’t have a medical certificate. You know, people like street surgeons.”

surgeon, surgeons

to me,” Humbert

glimpse at her scar can tell me information you didn’t

“Send me the photo, and

think he’d persuade Caden, who was too cold and arrogant to understand

for Wallis as he, actually, captured her in

Caden should be to blame as it’s hard for people like them to care for a woman. They were apt to confined their women

think Caden could send him the picture as he

to drop his cigarette, which burned his arm on his lap. The sudden pain made

It hurts. “Wait up, what did

message as he asked.

it…which was a picture of a “true” scar—a nasty one filling the whole

as he stared at the picture. Why did he think it implied Caden was unwilling to show him

it as he studied on the HD

clear enough?” Caden asked annoyingly, and Humbert hastily answered, “I got

“What?”

a street surgeon’s work as the bitch didn’t needle the scar properly, not to

his jaw as he could picture Humbert’s words in his mind where a twisting woman was pressed against the operation bed…His heart

the heck

Humbert cut him off. “You can’t blame them as it’s your bad attitude and indifference that made her life a living hell for

me for not reminding you that what Grace had suffered was

didn’t know about her when she was the daughter of family James, and you couldn’t know her

Humbert was shocked by his own words. It occurred to him the reason why Grace, a confident and lively girl, would turn out to be