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“Wait.” I caught his hand before he could pull away.

Lachlan rose from his crouch and leaned one hip against the boulder beside me. I used my good foot to push myself a little farther up onto the rock, then drew his hand closer, turning his palm up for a better look.

“What happened here?”

His gaze dropped to the scar. “That’s from when Luca Genovese and Nikolai Volkov brought me and the rest of the Xyst men into The Syndicate. Luca controls the old-school mob side of things across the Northeast—the families, the unions, the docks, and plenty of legitimate businesses too. Nik rules the underworld from the shadows. He runs Anonymous, DarkMatter Security, and ended up Pakhan of his father’s Russian Bratva, whether he wanted the job or not. We cut our palms and swore a blood oath to one another.”

I traced the uneven line with my thumb. “That looks more like a burn wound than a cut.”

“Aye. The cut was only the beginning.”

I stopped tracing the scar and stared up at him, thoroughly confused.

Lachlan smirked. “Luca gave each of us a saint card. We rolled them up, set them on fire, and burned them into the cuts to seal them.”

“You burned a piece of paper into an open wound?”

“Aye.”

“On purpose?”

“That is generally how an oath works, Mouse.”

I gave him a long look, reconsidering the collective sanity of every man in The Syndicate. “I bet it hurt a lot.”

His expression lost some of its amusement. “Like fucking hell.”

The blunt answer caught me off guard.

I’d heard Lachlan scream beneath electrical shocks, water torture, beatings, and things I tried not to think about. I’d also watched him refuse to give Isabeast a damn thing she wanted. If he described the pain as fucking hell, I could only imagine how awful that ritual must have been.

And he had chosen it.

“Everyone did that?” I asked, my voice pitching up in disbelief.

“Aye. My brother and the other men from Xyst. Every one of us.”

“Why saints?”

“Luca’s idea. Each man got one he thought suited him.”

I looked again at Lachlan’s scarred palm. “Who did he give you?”

“Saint Columba.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

“He was an Irish monk with one hell of a temper. It got him exiled, but he eventually learned enough discipline to put all that rage to better use and became a leader instead of getting himself killed.”

I glanced up at him. “So the saint was a warning.”

“Most likely. Luca probably got as far as Irish and bad temper and decided he’d found his man.”

I smiled, but my attention returned to the scar beneath my thumb.

“You really believe your men will risk their lives to find you?”

Lachlan’s answer came without hesitation. “I know they will.”