Chapter 21 #2
The child’s eyes flickered open. They were unfocused and glazed with fever, but they were still her.
“Is it gonna taste bad?” The question came out as barely a whisper.
He almost laughed. Almost cried. “Probably.”
“‘Kay.” Her eyes drifted to him, and something that might have been a smile tugged at her cracked lips. “Trust you.”
Don’t, he wanted to say. I don’t deserve it.
Instead, he helped Jessa raise the cup to Dani’s lips.
She drank, coughed, then drank some more. By the time the cup was empty, she was trembling with exhaustion, her eyes falling closed again.
“Now we wait,” he said.
The waiting was the worst part. He sat on one side of the bed, Jessa on the other, both of them staring at the small figure between them as if they could will her to recover through sheer force of attention. The minutes crawled by, each one an eternity of doubt and fear and desperate hope.
Then Dani coughed.
His heart seized. The cough was harsh, wet, worse than before—no, no, no—and he was reaching for her, ready to… To do what? What could he possibly do if his medicine was killing her instead of curing her?
The coughing continued for what felt like hours, though it could only have been seconds. Dani’s small body convulsed with the force of it, her face contorting in pain.
And then it stopped.
The silence that followed was absolute. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. He could only stare at the child in the bed, waiting for the next cough, the next spasm, the next horrible sign that he’d failed—
Dani drew a breath.
Deep. Clear. Unobstructed.
“Her color,” Jessa whispered. “Tarek, look at her color.”
He looked. The fever flush was fading even as he watched, the angry red receding like a tide going out. Dani’s breathing steadied, deepened, became the easy rhythm of natural sleep rather than the labored gasping of illness.
He pressed his hand to her forehead.
Cool. Not cold, not the terrible chill of death, but blessedly, beautifully cool.
“It’s working.” His voice came out rough and cracked. “The fever’s breaking.”
Jessa made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh and wasn’t quite a sob. She grabbed his hand, squeezing hard enough to hurt, and he squeezed back.
They sat there together as dawn light crept across the floor, watching Dani’s chest rise and fall in the easy rhythm of healing sleep.
“How?” Jessa asked.
The question came much later that night, after Dani had woken long enough to drink some broth and complain about the taste of the medicine.
After she’d fallen asleep again—real sleep this time, deep and restful.
After Jessa had checked her temperature a dozen times, unable to quite believe that the fever was truly gone.
They sat together by the fire in the main room, Jessa curled against his side, her head on his shoulder. Exhaustion weighed on them both, but neither seemed willing to sleep yet. Not when there was still so much unspoken between them.
“How did you do it?” she asked again when he didn’t answer. “You said you weren’t a healer.”
“I said I wasn’t a healer anymore.” The distinction felt important, though he couldn’t have explained why.
“But you were. Once.”
The fire crackled, sending sparks spiraling up into the darkness.
“Yes.” The word cost him more than he’d expected. “Once.”
She waited, patient and still against his side. Not pushing. Not demanding. Just… present.
“I was chief healer to Prince Varian of the Third House,” he said finally.
“One of the most powerful Vultor lords on our homeworld. I spent fifteen years in his service. Fifteen years developing medicines, treating injuries, and researching cures for diseases that had plagued our people for generations.”
“That sounds… honorable.”
“I thought it was.” The bitterness in his voice surprised him. It had been so long since he’d spoken of this. “I was proud of my work. Proud of what I’d accomplished. The medicines I developed saved thousands of lives. The techniques I pioneered are still used today.”
“Then what happened?”
The fire had burned down to embers. He stared into their red glow, seeing images from a past he’d tried so hard to forget.
“I found out what Varian was really using them for.”
She went very still.
“He modified a respiratory treatment I developed. He changed the dosage and altered the delivery method, turning it into a weapon.” His claws extended, scraping against the arm of the chair.
“He used it on his enemies, filling their homes with it while they slept. He watched them suffocate, their lungs burning from the inside out.”
“Tarek…”
“The pain reliever I created for warriors recovering from battle wounds? He gave it to prisoners. Just enough to keep them conscious while he—” He stopped, unable to continue. Unable to describe the horrors he’d witnessed when he finally discovered the truth.
“It wasn’t your fault.” Her hand found his, her fingers twining through his own. “You didn’t know what he was doing.”
“I should have known,” he said savagely. “I was blind. Willfully, deliberately blind. I didn’t want to see what was right in front of me because it would have meant accepting that everything I’d built, everything I’d sacrificed, had been turned into instruments of torture and death.”
“What did you do? When you found out?”
“I confronted him.” A broken laugh scraped from his throat. “I demanded that he stop, and threatened to expose him to the Council of Houses. He laughed at me. He told me that I was naive and that healing was simply a pleasant side effect of developing more efficient methods of killing.”
“And then?”
“Then I destroyed my research.” The memory still burned. All those years of work. All that knowledge. All gone in a single night of fire and rage. “Every formula, every prototype, every scrap of documentation. I burned it all. And when the guards came to stop me, I—”
He broke off, his whole body trembling with the force of suppressed emotion.
“You fought them,” she said quietly. “You killed them.”
“Yes.” The admission felt like a confession. Like absolution would never be enough. “I killed twelve of them before they brought me down. Twelve soldiers who were just following orders. Twelve deaths on my conscience to add to all the others.”
“They would have killed you.”
“I wish they had.”
The words hung in the air between them, heavy and terrible.
“The Council exiled me instead,” he continued.
“Death would have been too clean. Too merciful. They stripped me of my rank, my name, my family connections. They sent me to the farthest edge of known space with orders never to return.” He laughed again, the sound hollow.
“They thought it was a punishment. They didn’t understand that it was exactly what I wanted. ”
“And the vow?”
“I made it to myself.” He turned to look at her, finally, and saw nothing but compassion in her eyes. No judgment. Just… understanding. “I swore that I would never practice medicine again. Never create anything that could be twisted and used to harm innocents.”
“But you broke that vow.” She reached up to touch his face, her fingers gentle against the rough stubble of his jaw. “For Dani.”
“For both of you.” He caught her hand, pressed a kiss to her palm. “I would break a thousand vows for you. Burn a thousand worlds. Become the monster they said I was, if that’s what it took to keep you safe.”
“You’re not a monster.”
“You don’t know what I’m capable of.”
“I know exactly what you’re capable of.” She smiled, soft and sure. “You’re capable of love. You choose to help even when it costs you everything.” Her thumb brushed across his cheekbone. “That’s not what makes a monster.”
He wanted to believe her, wanted it more than he’d wanted anything in years.
“My name,” he said, the words coming before he could stop them. “My true name, before the exile, was Tarek’val Koronis. Healer of the Third House. Keeper of the Sacred Remedies.”
“Tarek’val.” She tested the name on her tongue, and hearing it from her lips made something crack open in his chest. “It suits you.”
“It was a different person. A different life.”
“Maybe.” She leaned up to press a kiss to his mouth, soft and sweet and full of promise. “But maybe some parts of that person are still worth keeping.”
He kissed her back, pouring all the things he couldn’t say into the press of his lips against hers. When they finally drew apart, the first light of dawn was creeping through the entrance to the den.
“We should sleep,” she murmured against his shoulder.
“We should,” he agreed, though neither of them moved.
They sat there together, watching the darkness give way to light, and from the other room, Dani’s clear, healthy breathing drifted through the silence like a blessing.