Chapter 7 #2
“He looked up to me,” Jarran said. His voice was raw, scraped hollow. “I—I returned for him and… Evie, he trusted me.”
“He did,” she said simply. “He was your younger brother.”
“Yes.” A breath. “I was supposed to protect him. But I didn’t, did I?”
She didn’t say anything to that. There was nothing to say that wouldn’t be a lie or a platitude, and he deserved better than that. She kept her hand in his hair and let the silence hold.
Eventually, he straightened. Pulled back. His face was wrecked. Red eyes, wet cheeks, jaw tight. “What happened to me?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” she replied, sounding just as scratchy as he did.
He looked down at his hand on her wrist and awareness bloomed in his expression. He released her suddenly. “Did I hurt you?”
“No.”
“I grabbed you.”
“Yes, but you didn’t hurt me.” She held up her wrist. The skin wasn’t even pink where he’d held her. No bruising. “See? I’m fine. You remained in control of your strength. You didn’t forget to be careful with me.”
He reached out and took her wrist again. Gingerly, this time. His fingers settled over the place where he’d gripped her, checking. His finger touched lightly against her pulse point and slid across the skin.
Evie’s breath caught.
The contact was featherlight. His calloused fingers moved over the inside of her wrist where the thin skin covered a fluttering pulse. A shiver ran through her, involuntary, starting at the point of contact and spreading up her arm and down through her center.
He looked up and his eyes locked on hers. Ah, yes. So much more intensity. Enough to know that he registered the shiver and the rapid breath she couldn’t steady. His fingers stilled against her pulse, pressing just enough to feel the speed of it.
He knew. She could see it in his face. He didn’t have the vocabulary for it, maybe, but his body understood what her body was telling him. The same neural pathways that had just exploded with memory were reading her response and she watched the knowledge flare behind his dark green eyes.
She pulled her wrist free and picked up the scanner and tablet, and put them in her bag. Her hands were steady, now. The rest of her was not.
“That was a major breakthrough,” she said, managing a level voice. “You may start remembering other things, now.”
Jarran rubbed a hand over his face. “I know.”
“We’ll talk more about this next session.” She wouldn’t look at him. “For now, you should rest. You just went through something traumatic and the implant had to work hard to bring you down.”
She could feel his eyes on her.
“Okay.”
She stood. Her legs were stiff and a line of sweat slid down the middle of her back. She shouldered her bag and glanced at the guards at the lift, who were pretending to have a conversation while watching her.
“Same time tomorrow?” Jarran asked, low and rough.
It was the same question he asked every session. But this time it sounded more like an invitation than an inquiry.
“Same time tomorrow.”
She walked up the aisle. The guards straightened as she approached.
“Is he stable?” the taller one asked.
“He’s stable. The implant is functioning normally. Please take him to his quarters to rest.” She resumed walking. “I’ll note the incident in his file. No restraint escalation needed.”
“Understood, Doctor.”
Through the bay doors. Into the lift. She pressed the button for her level, leaned against the back wall and closed her eyes.
She could still feel his thumb on her wrist. The pressure of it. The rough, calloused pad sliding over her pulse. The heat of his skin, so much warmer than hers. His whole body had shaken against hers, and holding him had felt like the most natural thing in the world.
Her hands were shaking now. In the lift, alone, with no one watching, her composure cracked and her hands trembled at her sides.
The lift doors opened. She walked to her quarters, stepped inside, and sat on the edge of the bed. Her bag hit the floor. She dropped her face into her hands and let out a shaky exhale.
I’m submitting my resignation, she thought. I am submitting my resignation because when he looked at me, I wanted him to see me, not his doctor, but Evie.
She’d held patients before. She’d comforted people in crisis.
Physical contact during a therapeutic breakthrough wasn’t unusual and it wasn’t unprofessional.
She could justify every second of what had happened in that bay.
The hand in his hair. The steady hold while he cried.
Textbook crisis management. Any supervising physician would have approved.
Hell, the guards hadn’t given her any side-eye.
But she couldn’t justify the shiver or her racing heart when he found her pulse. There was no justifying the heat that had spread through her belly when he’d looked up and known she was attracted to him.
She. Was. His. Doctor. For fuck’s sake. Every ethics guideline she’d ever studied flashed red, scrolling through her brain in bold font, and she did not care.
That was the worst part. She knew the rules—believed in the rules.
And none of them were louder than the memory of his head against her shoulder.
None of that reasoning touched the ache she’d felt in her chest as he said his brother’s name.
Evie sat on the edge of the bed for a long time.
Eventually, she picked up the tablet and opened Jarran’s file.
She added the session notes. She documented the memory breakthrough, the name recovery, the neural cascade, the implant response data.
She wrote it clean and clinical and precise, then she closed the file, set the tablet on the desk, and lay back on the bed.
Tomorrow, she’d resign. She wasn’t sure how much of the truth she’d tell Silca, but she knew one thing for sure: she needed to get out of there and away from Jarran. It was the only right thing to do. For both of them.