Chapter 40
Draven
She weighed nothing in my arms.
That was wrong. Tess was solid. Months of training had put real weight under her skin, and I knew the shape of her, the heat of her, the way her body took up space when she was awake and in it.
Tonight she felt like something I could lose by breathing wrong.
"Take care of her, brother." Amrion's voice came in low and quiet at the back of my mind. No teasing this time. No edge. Just the steady weight of a dragon who knew exactly what he was looking at through my eyes, and was telling me what we both already knew.
"I know."
"She's a keeper."
"I know, Amrion."
He went quiet. Not retreating, not yet. Just letting it sit.
I took the long way around. Past the back stairs nobody used at this hour, because I didn't want to see anyone, and because my arms had refused to put her down the moment Mason had stepped back and said take her.
Her cheek was over my heart. Every few steps I felt her exhale against my throat, slow and uneven.
She wasn't asleep. She wasn't quite awake either.
"Where are you taking me?"
Her voice was small. Hoarse from the smoke and whatever else had happened down there I hadn't been close enough to stop.
"My place."
I kept my voice even.
"I need to take care of you tonight."
She didn't argue. I felt the question move through her and dissolve into something quieter, and then she went still in my arms—a different kind of still than a moment before.
She was reaching.
I felt the shape of it without seeing it. The small private hum of her attention turning inward, the subtle shift of a bond opening. Mason. She was checking with Mason.
I almost smiled.
Of course she was. She had a mate. She had a man who'd already claimed her, and Tess Whittaker was not going to walk into another man's bedroom without her bonded mate knowing about it.
The whole thing was so painfully her it made longing catch in my chest. She was wrecked, half-conscious, riding in the arms of a man she hadn't yet named hers, and her first thought was hold on, let me check in.
I kept walking. I didn't slow down. I didn't speed up.
Whatever Mason sent back was warm. I felt the moment it landed in her—felt her shoulders drop against me, felt the last small tension in her spine give way, felt the slow exhale that followed. She turned her face further into my throat.
"Okay," she said, against my skin.
The okay was for Mason.
I knew it. I was glad for it.
"Draven." Amrion's voice slid into my head as I reached the door of my room, low and warm and unmistakably amused at the situation he could feel me walking into.
"Mm."
"I'm going to give you some space tonight."
I almost stopped walking.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." A beat. The dragon-equivalent of a smirk. "Try not to need me for the next several hours. I have a feeling you won't."
I felt him retreat. Not gone, never gone, but pulled back to the edges of my mind the way he did when he was deliberately giving me privacy.
The bond went quiet around the corners. Just him and me and the steady warm presence of him at the back of my skull, withdrawn but watching, the way a brother watches you walk into something he's not going to interrupt.
"Amrion."
"Mm."
"Thank you."
I felt him laugh. Not in words. Just the low pleased rumble of a dragon who had been waiting a long time to see his rider land somewhere soft, and was not going to make it weird.
I shouldered the door of my room open and carried her across the threshold, and the sconces came up amber the moment I crossed the doorway. I'd put them in myself the second week I'd moved in, replaced the cold standard-issue overheads with something that didn't make a room feel like a clinic.
Red walls. I'd painted them on the first weekend.
The long low couch I'd had shipped from home because the dorm-issue chair was offensive to the human body.
The woven hanging on the wall above the bed, the one my mother had made before her hands stopped working, that traveled with me to every room I'd ever lived in.
Bold colors. Heavy fabrics. A small space, dorm-style like all of them, but I'd worked on it.
It felt like somewhere a body could rest.
She'd never been in it.
The thought arrived and stayed. I'd been in her quarters a dozen times.
Held her cat. Put away her groceries. I had never, in all the months we'd been circling each other, brought her into my own space, and now I was carrying her through it bloody and exhausted and mine, and the fact that I'd waited this long had a flavor I couldn't quite swallow.
Her head turned a little against my shoulder. She was looking. Taking it in through the cracked-open exhaustion the way she took in everything, which was to say more than she was letting on.
"Your place is pretty," she murmured.
"You can't even see it."
"I can see enough." Her hand moved on my chest, vague and tired. "Red walls. Knew it."
I almost laughed. The fact that she was making jokes from inside the wreckage of her own body was so completely Tess it threatened to undo me right there in the doorway.
I took her to the couch. Not the bed. The bed wasn't for her like this—the bed was for after, for when she was clean and warm and on the other side of whatever the night was going to be. I was not putting her down on it with Garanth's blood still on her collarbone.
I lowered her onto the cushions slowly. Watched her face for the wince.
It came, small. A tightening at the corners of her mouth as her body adjusted to being held by something other than me.
She let out a slow breath and sank back into the couch and the wince eased, and the relief that flickered across her face when the cushions took her weight did something to me I wasn't going to think about right now.
"Stay here. I'm getting you food."
"I'm not—"
"I know. Eat anyway."
The kitchen alcove was six steps away. I pulled a banana off the counter, filled a glass with water, came back and sat down beside her. Watched her take the first bite.
She ate slowly. Carefully. The way a person eats when they're not sure their stomach is going to cooperate.
But she ate. And after the second bite her shoulders dropped another half-inch, and after the third I could see her start to remember she had a body that was allowed to want things, and I made my hand move from my own knee to the back of her neck under the matted hair.
Bare warm skin. Pulse jumping against my palm.
She made a small sound. Not quite a word. Her eyes closed for one long second and then opened again, and she leaned into my hand.
The thing inside me that had been screaming since the alarm went off finally went quiet.
She was here. She was eating. She was leaning into my hand.
That was enough.
She made it through half the banana and most of the water before she stopped. I took the rest from her without comment.
"Bath," I said.
She looked up at me. Red-rimmed eyes, exhausted, so present it knocked the wind out of me.
"Okay."
I gathered her up off the couch and carried her into the bathroom, and I started the water before I did anything else. Hot. Hot enough to hurt a little. She needed the cold pulled out of her bones, and lukewarm wasn't going to do it.
I set her on the wide stone bench along the wall.
"I'm going to get the worst of it off you first. Before you get in."
She nodded. Watching me with that same red-rimmed steadiness, her eyes following my hands as I moved.
I knelt in front of her.
It wasn't a decision. It was just where the work was.
Boots first—I unlaced them with hands I refused to let shake, set them aside, peeled off her socks.
Her feet were cold. I held them between my palms for a second and she made a small sound that wasn't quite a word, her eyes closing again at the simple animal relief of warmth, and I kept moving.
Her jacket. The buckles on her vest. Blood had crusted into the clasps and I worked them open one at a time, slow, while she watched me from above.
Her breathing had evened out. She was letting me do this.
The tiredness was starting to look less like a wound and more like the thing tiredness was supposed to be, a body putting itself down because it had finally found a place safe enough.
"I keep thinking about what this month would've looked like without you," she said quietly.
I looked up. Her eyes were on my hands, on the buckle I was working open.
"Not just tonight. All of it. The investigation. The training." She paused. "You made me feel like I actually was worth listening to."
I stopped. Held her gaze. The buckle forgotten.
"You are," I said. Low. Certain. "Always."
She nodded. Small. Like she was trying to believe me.
I went back to the buckles.
When I got her down to the layer against her skin, I stopped and met her eyes.
"Tell me if you want me to stop."
"I won't."
"Tell me anyway."
She almost smiled. "Okay, Draven."
I got the rest of it off her.
And then she was in front of me on the bench. Naked. Lit from above by the warm bathroom light.
The thing that hit me wasn't what I'd been bracing for.
I'd been bracing for the inventory. The catalogue of every place she'd been hurt today, the list I was going to carry around inside myself forever. And those were there—burns curling down her forearm, a livid mark across her collarbone, a cut at her hairline gone dark—and I clocked each one.
But what I was looking at was her.
God.
She was curvy. Her hips flared soft and full.
Her thighs were strong now from months of training, new muscle under the softness, and the contrast of strong and soft was the most devastating thing I had ever seen on a woman.
Her belly was rounded, just a little, the way a real body should be, and I wanted to put my face against it.
There was a scar low on her hip I'd never seen.
I loved it.