Chapter 5 #2
The living quarters were undecorated, but he’d done his best to make them comfortable in the ways he understood.
The bed he deposited Cecilia on was plush, and he’d gotten her favorite brands of body wash and shampoo for the shower.
He’d even found her exact toothbrush and placed it by the sink.
It sat there, unwrapped and ready for her, since he bought it six months prior.
There were no windows in the bedroom, but he’d placed string lights like the ones he observed in her apartment over the doorway, and a soft pink rug in the center of the floor.
It was a weak imitation of her colorful world, but he was proud of what he’d managed to cobble together, all things considered.
And she looked damn good in his bed.
Sloane’s chest rose and fell with increasingly labored breaths as he slid his arms out from beneath her. Her head tilted to one side, revealing the perfect shapes of her profile and the nasty bruise left by the prick who pistol-whipped her.
A rumbling growl passed through the modulator. “Fucker,” he hissed, daring to curve his gloved fingers below her chin. “I’d kill him for you twice if I could.”
Cecilia didn’t respond. Her breathing remained even, undisturbed by his voice or his touch. The temptation to indulge his curiosity about the texture of her skin and hair, the scent of her and the feeling of her breath on his face was almost too much.
Sloane pulled himself back immediately.
Protecting her was his priority. It was the only thing that mattered. That included protecting her from himself.
Hissing at his own lack of self-control, he strode to the bathroom, where he kept an advanced med kit. He’d patch her up first, then see to everything else. Sloane ran through how much time they’d have before he was missed as he expertly extracted and organized the medical supplies he’d need.
It was a lucky thing that he’d just gotten off a week of local assignments. The members of Fracture had recently been forced into taking weekends, something none of them knew what to do with at first. That meant he had two days before anyone reported his disappearance to the captain.
Sloane grimaced. He wasn’t afraid of Kazimier. Realistically, he knew they were evenly matched. But he didn’t like his odds if the rest of Fracture hunted him, too.
And they would, if they thought he’d gone AWOL. They hadn’t just been trained to be threats to the populace. They were trained to kill each other, too.
Doesn’t matter, he decided as he began the painstaking process of plucking glass from the cuts in her knees, hands, and feet. Each shard reminded him of just how fragile she was, and every one of them was a recrimination of his failure.
If something as simple as glass could hurt her, how could he expect her to survive in the world without his protection?
Even a momentary lapse had put her at the mercy of three vampires.
Only the gods knew what could happen if he left on an extended assignment.
The thought of leaving her alone for months at a time sent chills down his spine.
Keeping her locked away in the Battery was the only choice.
Sloane used only the tips of his metal claw-caps to grip the rubbery bandages as he carefully placed them on her body. By the time he was done, she appeared to have more bandages than skin, but he wasn’t about to be too cautious with her.
Easing the blankets out from under and then over her sleeping form, he sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, his hands braced on his knees.
Sloane had gone days without sleep. He’d run hundreds of miles and scaled buildings with his bare hands. Nothing, in his extensive experience, left him as out of breath as tending to his doe.
His gaze was drawn back to her magnetically as he tried to find his normal rhythm. Beautiful was the word to describe her. Perfect was another.
The only beautiful, perfect thing in his entire fucked up existence. The only person who looked at him with doe eyes. The only person who asked him for his name. The only person who smiled.
The only person he’d die to protect.
Sloane’s exhale shook as he surrendered to the urge to strip off one glove. Her right hand lay on top of the sheets, fingers curled loosely in sleep. Unsuspecting and breakable and there.
His skin was a purple so pale it could be mistaken for white. It seemed like a painfully alien color against the warmth of her skin tone when he hovered his fingers over her knuckles. The tips of his real claws, diamond-hard and razor-sharp, touched the back of her hand first.
A flashing warning appeared in his peripheral vision. It was the heart rate alarm wired into the screen of his visor.
Sloane swallowed hard. His fingers trembled as he slowly pressed their pads against the silken skin of her knuckles.
She burned.
Like he’d stuck his fingers into the heart of a plasma charge, the smallest contact seared him to the bone. Sloane gasped, shocked by the instant pleasure-pain that came with the touch. He panted as he followed the lines of her tendons beneath her paper-thin skin and fine webbing of veins.
A flush of heat suffused his body, starting from his fingertips and traveling up his arm to infect every cell. A popping, tingling sensation came with it, like there was some sort of chemical agent in her flesh that was rapidly spreading through his system.
Alerts continued to pop on his visor’s screen. A warning about his heart rate. Abnormal vital signs. Blood oxygen exceeding normal levels. Perspiration increasing. None of it made him pull away.
He couldn’t. Not even the concrete ceiling and cliff caving in on top of them would’ve made him move from that spot, or stopped him from tracing his way up her wrist toward the soft curve of her inner elbow.
“Cecilia,” he mouthed, daring to draw the tip of his tingling claw over a dark freckle.
Her arm jerked. Sloane reared back and leapt away from the bed as she drew her limb in toward her chest, her head turning restlessly on the plain white pillowcase.
Away from him.
A flash of shame burned almost as hot as the feeling that came when he touched her. Snatching his glove from where he’d discarded it on the bed, Sloane swallowed the bitter taste of want and fled, locking the door behind him.