Chapter 3
Kellat smelled Delilah before he saw her… grease, salt, and under it that warm floral note that had been plaguing him since she’d arrived in his medical bay.
He came around the corner of the plaza half-braced to find her collapsed on the tile, blood in her hair, brain hemorrhaging from whatever she’d torn loose when she’d run from medical.
Instead she was sitting on a stool with a fry halfway to her mouth.
Whole and upright. Laughing at something the half-ketalli boy behind the counter had said.
The relief hit him so hard his knees went loose for half a step. And then, just as fast, it curdled into something that snarled.
She’d walked out of medical bay just hours post-coma with no monitoring, no escort, into a public concourse full of strangers who had no reason to be gentle with a human female. And she was eating fries.
“I didn’t touch her.” The young male behind the counter was already backing toward the grill, his hands up and his black eyes wide. “I swear it, my lord healer, I didn’t—”
Delilah was off the stool before Kellat said a word, planting herself between him and the server like she thought he meant to put a fist through the counter.
“Move,” he growled.
“He didn’t do anything.” She stabbed the fry toward him. “He fed me. That’s it. So whatever you’re about to do, you can do it to me instead of scaring the poor guy half to death.”
“Then you can explain to me,” he said, his voice dangerously low, “why a patient with active neural remapping and no cleared discharge is sitting in a public plaza three sectors from medical… unsupervised.”
“I got hungry.”
“You got lost,” he said. “You could have collapsed. You could have seized. Your brain has been rewriting itself for days, and you decided the best use of your first hour awake was to run off?”
“I decided the best use of my first hour awake was to not stare at a ceiling tile until I lost my mind.” She didn’t back down an inch, chin up, fry still pointed at his chest. “Nobody died. I’m fine. Look at me. Fine.”
He glared down at her. “You are not qualified to determine that.”
She glared right back. “And you’re not qualified to boss me around like I’m a toddler who wandered off at the mall.”
Kellat blinked, surprise rolling through him. Nobody argued with him like that. He opened his mouth to say so then snapped it shut.
“Your sister asked me to keep you safe,” he said. “She trusted me to watch over you while she can’t. What do you think it would do to her, knowing you ran the moment my back was turned?”
Delilah went white. Not pale but white, the color draining out of her face so fast he thought for one horrible second that he’d been right about the seizure risk after all and she was actually about to collapse.
“That’s a shitty thing to say,” she said, looking like he’d hit her.
It was. He’d known it the moment it left his mouth, but he couldn’t claw the words back now. The win sat in his chest like a stone.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
“I’m not finished yet!” she said, turning her back on him and shoving a couple more fries into her mouth.
Lady, give him strength. “You are now.”
Closing a hand around her upper arm, he turned her toward the door.
“Hey! Let go of me, you asshole!” She yelped and lunged sideways, snagging the paper bag of fries off the counter with her free hand, hugging it to her chest like he might try to wrestle it off her too.
“You are such a jerk,” she announced as he managed to get her out of the door, loud enough that heads turned two stalls down. “You know that? A giant, bossy, freaking bully.”
His jaw tightened. Junior healers didn’t speak to him like this.
Warriors twice her size didn’t speak to him like this.
He was Lead Healer of Devan Station, V’Raav of the V’Raav line, and this tiny human female was hauling a bag of fried potatoes down the concourse behind him and calling him names in front of the entire civilian sector like he was some errand boy who’d overstepped.
“Careful,” she added, hopping to keep pace with his stride, “or I’m telling everyone the big scary healer manhandled a coma patient over some fries.”
The lift doors hissed open on a car already packed with warriors, three of them, all in the black leathers of the security division.
Kellat bared his teeth and snarled. “Out.”
They took one look at his face and evacuated without a word, boots clearing the threshold before the doors had even finished opening properly. He hauled Delilah into the lift with him, and the doors slid shut, sealing the two of them in the sudden, ringing quiet.
“Wow.” She wrenched her arm free and clutched her bag of fries to her chest like a shield. “Do you get off on that? Scaring the crap out of people smaller than you?”
“They were not smaller than me.”
“Oh, forgive me, your majesty.” She rolled her eyes so hard he was surprised they didn’t get stuck. “Bullying people your own size, then. Much better.”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t, really, not with the way his brain had snagged on the word smaller and dragged his gaze down her the way water found the lowest point in a room.
She barely cleared his chest. If he reached out now, one hand would span the whole curve of her waist. Her hair had come loose from whatever knot she’d twisted it into back in medical, honey-blonde strands stuck to her cheek with sweat and grease.
There was the tiniest smear of sauce at the corner of her mouth, and she was glaring up at him like she thought she could win this.
The anger in his chest didn’t leave. It just changed shape, turned into something lower and hungrier, something that had no business existing between a healer and his patient.
His gaze dropped to her mouth, to that smear of sauce, to the stubborn tilt of her chin beneath it, and for one long, stupid heartbeat he thought about exactly what he’d do about it if he were any other male on this station.
He hauled his eyes back up, but it was too late. She’d seen it. Her breath caught on a gasp and her chin shot up another degree as she glared at him.
Neither of them moved. The air between them went tight enough to hum, close enough that he could feel the heat coming off her skin, and he still hadn’t stepped back—
His bracer comp chimed. Jerking back, he put the whole width of the lift between them in one stride. He pressed two fingers to the comp, and the priority code flashed red across the readout, the kind of red that meant answer this or explain yourself to someone with more braids than you.
“V’Raav,” he said.
“Lead Healer.” Laarn’s voice was dry and precise, the way it always was. “I need you off-station within the hour. Hand your caseload to your second and get yourself to the shuttle bay.”
Kellat’s gaze cut sideways to Delilah. She’d gone still on the other side of the lift car, staring at the readout panel like she was memorizing the layout.
“Where am I going?” he asked, because you didn’t say no to the Lord Healer of the Latharian Empire.
“Itash-Vetan-4. The medical conference.”
He frowned. “That conference has three healers senior to me within a day’s flight of the system. T’Rass alone outranks me by four decades. Why am I the one packing a bag?”
There was a pause on the line, just long enough that it wasn’t lag. No, the Lord Healer was choosing his words, which was interesting.
“Because you’re the only one I trust with this.”
Kellat’s mouth quirked at the corners. Laarn wasn’t a male who handed out trust or respect like sweets at a mating ceremony.
Kellat had earned every scrap of either from Laarn the hard way, elbow-deep in a battlefield triage tent at nineteen while Laarn stood over his shoulder testing him.
He rolled his shoulder where the worst of his scars were.
“Flattery,” Kellat said. “From you. I’m almost concerned.”
“Take it as flattery if it gets you on the draanthing shuttle faster.” There was a rustle on the other end of the line, as if Laarn was pulling up files as they spoke. “The Vorrtan delegation is attending. First official medical-level contact since they came out of hiding.”
Kellat’s eyebrow winged up. The Vorrtan… He’d been obsessed with stories of them when he was a child. A race of genetically engineered, shape-shifting supersoldiers from an ancient war, they were supposed to have regenerative abilities that had long since been lost from the main Latharian genome.
“The Vorrtan have healers?”
“Indeed.” Laarn’s voice held the edge of a smile. “It came as a surprise to me too. From what’s crossed my desk, their medicine has moved somewhere none of the rest of us have gone. Regenerative work. Genetic repair at a level that shouldn’t be possible.”
Kellat’s pulse ticked up, a professional itch under his sternum that he rubbed at absently. Regenerative work. Genetic repair.
“You want me finding out what they know,” he said slowly, “for our other patient.”
He didn’t say the name because he didn’t need to.
Charlotte Mason’s case sat in a locked file on his terminal that only he and Laarn had clearance to open.
She was something to do with the new crown prince, T’Raal’s mate…
but that was as much as he knew of her background that wasn’t medical.
Then there was the fact that the emperor’s interest in her was the kind of thing nobody said out loud in a lift, priority code or not.
“I want you finding out what they know,” Laarn said, his voice grim and determined.
“Quietly. You’re the only healer on this station’s staff roster who’s touched her file.
If anyone else starts asking a Vorrtan delegate pointed questions about neurological damage of that kind, then word gets back to people who don’t need to hear it. ”
Kellat’s gaze flicked to Delilah again. She’d abandoned the pretense of not listening and was watching him openly now, brow furrowed, a fry forgotten between her fingers.
“An hour,” he said, dragging his attention back to the call. “I have a patient mid-workup.”