Chapter Three #2
That was the point where whatever patience I had left thinned past usefulness.
He was bleeding on my cot, responding to my touch in ways neither of us could ignore, warning me in fragments, and now apparently there were enemies somewhere beyond my door who might be moving toward a settlement full of people who had no idea danger was coming.
I pulled in a breath and let it out slowly.
“Thexan,” I said, keeping my voice level by force, “what the hell is going on?”
His attention snapped fully to me.
“I need more than yes, no, and potentially,” I continued. “I need to know what this is, what you are, and whether everyone outside this room is in danger because you came here.”
He let the question hang between us before answering.
Then the surrounding air seemed to harden.
“Yes,” he said. “They are in danger.”
The answer landed cold.
“Who is they?”
“The ones tracking me.”
“How close?”
“I do not know.”
“How many?”
“I do not know that either.”
“But they’re dangerous.”
“Yes.” His eyes held mine, and this time he did not leave the answer there.
“They are trained to remove threats without hesitation. If they find me here, they will not spare this structure because it contains civilians. They will not spare you because you lack information. They will evaluate proximity, interference, and usefulness. If you have aided me, you become a variable. Variables are removed.”
I closed my eyes briefly, because my mind needed one quiet second to rearrange the shape of the problem.
An unknown number of dangerous Mesaarkans—or something close enough to them to wound him—might be tracking him toward a settlement full of exhausted people with patched walls, aging weapons, and more courage than training.
When I opened my eyes, he was watching me.
“You should alert your leaders,” he said. “They should evacuate this structure and move your people away from me.”
“That would expose you.”
“Yes.”
“And if your enemies find you before you can stand?”
His expression did not change, but the stillness in him shifted into something colder.
“Then the threat remains concentrated on me.”
I stared at him. “You mean you die before they reach anyone else.”
“If I cannot move, that is the most efficient outcome.”
“No.”
His eyes hardened. “You do not understand.”
“I understand enough to know that men who say things like that are usually trying to make dying sound practical.”
“It is practical,” he said, rougher now. “It is not preferred.”
That stopped me.
For the first time, I heard something beneath the calculation. Not fear exactly. Not for himself. Something tighter than that.
“You don’t want to die,” I said.
“No.”
The answer was immediate this time.
“And yet you’re telling me to let it happen.”
“I am telling you to protect your people.”
“It’s also inconvenient,” I said, because if I let the moment get any heavier, I might feel it too much. “Since I just spent a great deal of effort keeping you alive.”
That should not have mattered to him.
I saw that it did.
Not much. Not in any way he would willingly show. But something in his face shifted, a minute change around the eyes, a softening so brief I might have imagined it if I had not been watching him with the focus of a woman trying to keep him from bleeding out on her cot.
I drew another breath and made the decision before I could talk myself out of it.
“You’re staying here tonight.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Brynn—”
“You cannot stand without tearing that wound open. Your neural regulation is unstable. Your body responds positively to proximity, which means sending you away would be medically stupid even if it were morally convenient. I’m not doing it.”
“You place yourself at risk.”
“I place myself at risk every time someone drags a half-dead stranger to my door.”
“I am not a stranger to your kind.”
“No,” I said, glancing over the scaled structure of his chest and the ridged planes of his face. “You definitely are not.”
His mouth tightened again, and this time I was almost certain it would have been a grim smile on anyone else.
I stepped away only long enough to retrieve a clean blanket from the storage cabinet.
The moment distance opened between us, I heard his breathing change.
He controlled it quickly, but not quickly enough.
I turned back and found him staring at the ceiling, every line of his body held in rigid restraint.
“You feel that when I move away.”
“Yes.”
The honesty surprised me.
I returned to the cot and spread the blanket carefully over him, avoiding the wound. “Does it hurt?”
“Not physically.”
That answer stayed with me.
I should have asked more. I should have demanded a full explanation, one that included every risk he had not yet named.
Instead, I found myself studying the controlled tension in his face and the way his fingers had curled against the blanket, not reaching for me, not asking, but fighting the need to do both.
For reasons I did not want to examine too closely, that mattered.
I sat in the chair beside the cot and rested my hand lightly against his forearm.
His eyes closed.
The effect was quiet this time, but no less real.
The tension eased from him gradually, not disappearing but settling into something his body could bear.
I watched the change with the same clinical attention I had given the wound, though there was nothing clinical about the way my own pulse responded.
“This is temporary,” I said, though I wasn’t sure whether I meant the treatment, his presence in my infirmary, or the strange connection tightening between us.
His eyes opened again.
“No,” he said softly. “It is not.”
I held his gaze, and for the first time since I had found him at the ridge, I let myself consider the possibility that the danger he represented was not the only reason I couldn’t make myself step away.
Then someone knocked hard on the infirmary door.
I stood too quickly, and his hand caught mine before I had taken a full step. This time, there was no unconsciousness to excuse it. His fingers closed around mine with controlled urgency, and his voice dropped lower than before.
“Do not open it until you know who stands outside.”
I looked toward the door, then back at him.
The knock came again.
“Brynn?” Tanner called from the other side. “You in there? We found blood on the lower ridge.”
Thexan’s grip tightened around my hand.
Not painfully.
Protectively.
And every instinct I had told me that whatever had followed him into my mountains had already begun to arrive.