The Twin They Erased novel · Chapter 6 of 24

Chapter 6: Stitches

The elbow came out of nowhere, and the world went white above my left eye.

Warm blood ran into my eyelashes and down my cheek.

The crowd in the barn gasped.

It was the first Saturday, and Ansel had given her girls their passes again, every one of them except me.

I had gone down the rope for the third time that month.

The champion's older sister was across the ring, a broad woman with a gold tooth, and she was grinning at my face.

"Stay down, Marrow Hill."

"Everybody says that," I said.

I wiped my eye with my wrist, grabbed her arm, and did what I always did.

It took two more rounds.

When the bell rang and the crowd shouted my name for the first time, I stood in the middle of the boards and could not see out of my left eye.

Eamon climbed through the ropes and looked at my face.

His own face changed.

"Back room," he said. "Now."

The back room was a feed closet with a bare bulb, a tin sink and a cot piled with grain sacks.

He swept the sacks onto the floor, sat me down on the cot and pulled the bulb cord twice to make it brighter.

From a cabinet over the sink he took a curved needle, black thread and a bottle of something clear.

"Do you know how to do that?" I asked.

"I've sewn up two horses, a dog and my brother." He poured the clear stuff over a cloth. "It'll hurt."

"Everything does."

"This hurts differently."

He held the cloth against my eyebrow, and I hissed through my teeth.

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