Boys of Beaufort: Book Three. Boys of Beaufort, #3

He finds Evan tied to a tree in the dark, head shaved, half-conscious, his uniform torn. The people who did this wore masks. There were five of them, maybe six. They called it a warning. Sean has never been the kind of person who believes in forgiveness before justice. He is exactly the kind of person who would burn an institution to the ground for the right reason. Now he has one. In the days that follow the attack, Evan rebuilds himself from the outside in - chin up, shoulders back, walking through Beaufort's corridors like the walls don't remember what he looked like when he shattered.
He is extraordinary at performing fine. He is less extraordinary at admitting that something has permanently changed in him, and that the only person he trusts with that admission is the boy who rode through the dark to find him. Between them, fragile and unspoken and terrifyingly real, something shifts from almost into certain. It is the worst possible time to fall. The Society watches. The Society has names.
And Sean, cataloguing every possible suspect with the cold precision of someone who has survived by reading faces instead of voices, is beginning to understand that the roots of the rot go deeper than any single act of cruelty. Boys of Beaufort - Book Three is the book where the armor comes off - for both of them - and what's underneath is more devastating than either one expected.