Chapter 4 #2
I hold him for ten seconds past the submission to make sure his eyes come back.
They come back. The gold drops to brown.
He shifts, half-furred, sobbing — wolves who break feral and come back are aware, instantly, of what they almost did, and Crawford is sobbing into the metal grating of the upper terrace and saying I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, and somewhere in the part of my brain that is still the coordinator I am noting that we are going to need to put this kid in protective custody until his pack can come for him.
I shift back.
The shift back is when it hits.
I get to my feet. The crowd is roaring now — not in fear, in something else, in the kind of awe that crowds reserve for a thing they did not think they were going to see.
Vice the coordinator. Vice, who can't fight anymore.
Vice, who just took a feral alpha down in forty seconds in front of three hundred witnesses.
I take one step.
The world tilts.
My legs go.
Petra is there.
She has come up the stairs in the time it took me to bring Crawford down.
She is at my left side and her shoulder is under my arm and she is taking my weight and she is, with the other hand, already feeling for the pulse in my carotid, already turning my chin to check the angle of my head, already saying to Nell over my shoulder, suite, now, full immobilization protocol, get me a backboard, in a voice that is not panicked and not even particularly raised but is the voice of someone who has decided exactly what is going to happen next.
I say her name.
She says, "Shut up. Walk."
We walk.
I walk because she is making me walk. We are down the stairway.
Across the pit floor. Down the central tunnel.
The crowd is still roaring somewhere above and behind, and Conrad is already organizing the prospects to clear the chamber, and Reaper is on Crawford in the upper terrace, and somewhere in the next forty-five minutes there will be a tournament to wrap up and a payout to manage and a feral alpha to extradite, but right now there is only Petra's shoulder under my arm and her hand at the base of my skull and the long walk to her suite.
She gets me on the examination table.
The fluorescent lights are too bright. She kills two of the four overheads. She lays me back. She immobilizes my neck with the cervical collar in eight seconds. She runs the portable scanner along the back of my skull and down through C2, C3, C4, C5, C6. She watches the screen. She breathes.
"The fusion held," she says.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. The fusion held. The bruising is in the soft tissue. There's no fracture. There's no displacement. There's no — there's no anything. You absolute fucking idiot. The fusion held."
She is shaking.
I am lying on my back on her examination table and I am looking up at her face — the fluorescent light caught in her hair, the sweat on her temples from running up to the upper terrace, the smear of someone's blood on her cheekbone that might be Crawford's or might be the Kentucky alpha's from earlier — and I am watching her hands shake.
Petra's hands. The hands that have not shaken in eleven years on the circuit.
Her hands are shaking because of me.
"Petra."
"You could have died."
"I didn't."
"You could have severed your spinal cord. You would have been a quadriplegic at thirty-two. You would have been a quad on the floor of an upper terrace at Bone Hollow, in front of three hundred witnesses, because you decided to play hero. Vice. Do you understand what you almost did."
"I do."
"Do you."
"People were going to die. I'd do it again."
"Yes," she says. "I know you would. That is the part that — that is the part I —"
She does not finish.
She sits down on the stool at the head of the table.
Her hands settle on the table, one on either side of my head.
She looks down at me. The fluorescent light is behind her now, haloed in her dark hair, and her face is in shadow and her eyes are dark and her mouth is set in the line of someone who is about to either cry or kill, and Petra Kazan does not cry, and I am the only available option for the other thing.
"Don't ever do that again."
"I can't promise that."
"I know."
I reach up.
The collar restricts my neck but not my arms. I get my hand on the back of her hand on the table.
I move my hand up the inside of her wrist, slow, and feel her pulse skip under my thumb.
Her wrist is small under my hand and her bones are dense and her skin is dry and warm from the work she has been doing for ten hours straight.
"Come here," I say.
She looks at me.
She leans forward.
She braces one hand on the table beside my head and the other on the table beside my hip and she lowers her face to mine, slow, and she stops with her mouth four inches from my mouth, and she says, "If I kiss you right now, and the C4 is more bruised than I think it is, and you have a delayed bleed, and the bleed kills you because I am here and not on the scanner, I will not survive that. "
"Petra."
"What."
"The scan was clear. I am not going to die in the next twenty minutes. Come here."
She comes.
Her mouth is on mine.
The kiss is not careful and it is not slow.
It is the kiss of two people who have spent three nights running in parallel toward the same point and have just been told that one of them almost died, and the kiss is for the part of both of them that wants to be sure the other is still in the world.
Her mouth opens. I taste bourbon — the half-tumbler she finished tonight while I was running the booth — and adrenaline, and the salt of someone who has been sweating for hours.
She tastes like she has been thinking about this.
She tastes like every time she has not let herself think about it.
I get a hand in her hair.
The other hand stays on the table because the wolf in me, even now, is too aware of what nearly happened to risk movement, and there is a thing I cannot do which is lift my head from the table.
But I can pull her down to me. I can pull her down to me, and I do, and the kiss deepens and slows and becomes the kiss of two people who are recalibrating what kind of thing they are doing.
She breaks it.
Her forehead is against mine.
"Vice."
"Damon."
She pulls back two inches. "What."
"My name. It's Damon. Vice is the road name. I would like — if we are doing this — for you to know my name."
"Damon."
"Yeah."
She kisses me again. Slower this time. The kind of kiss where she is — I do not have a word for what she is doing.
She is testing it. She is letting herself feel it.
She is allowing the eleven years of I do not stay to coexist for forty seconds with I am here.
I let her. I keep my hand in her hair and my mouth on her mouth and I do not push and I do not pull because Petra is a woman who has spent her whole adult life moving and I do not want to be one more thing she runs from.
When she pulls back the second time her eyes have changed. The pupils are wide. The gray-brown is almost gone.
She straightens.
She steps back from the table.
She crosses to the door. She closes it. She locks it.
She comes back to the table.
She undoes the cervical collar.
"Petra."
"Hush. The fusion held. The bruising is localized. You are not going to break in the next hour. If I am going to do this, I am going to do it without that thing in the way."
"Yes ma'am."
"And you are going to stay flat on this table, and you are going to keep your head still, and you are going to let me come to you, because I am not putting you in a position where you have to brace your neck for anything. Do you understand."
"Yes."
"Say it back."
"I stay flat. I don't move my head. You come to me."
"Good."
She removes her pit jacket. She removes the shirt under it — a long-sleeve thermal that is damp through with sweat, that she peels off in one practiced motion because she has had to clean herself in a thousand different field tents in eleven years and she does not have time for modesty about any of it.
She is wearing a sports bra. The line of her shoulders is dense with muscle that I have spent three nights cataloging from across rooms and I am cataloging again from below, slowly, because I have a perfect view from this table and she is not stopping me.
She crosses to me. She climbs onto the table.
She kneels astride my hips, careful with the table's weight rating which she has assessed because she is who she is, and she settles, and her hands come to rest flat on my chest over my t-shirt, and the heat of her through the cotton is a thing I feel all the way down.
She bends.
Her mouth is on my jaw, my throat, the unscarred side of my neck.
Her hands push my t-shirt up. She gets it off me with the help I can give from my arms while keeping my head flat, and then her hands are on my chest, on my stomach, on the long scars she has read about in the injury reports and is now reading with her fingers.
She traces the curve of the scar above my hip from the Memphis bout.
She traces the rotator-cuff scars on my shoulders.
She finds the long pale line on my left forearm from the knife in 2014.
She is doing what she did with my history a hundred miles ago in the chamber when she told me my own injuries — she is reading them, in order, with the focus of someone who is committing them to memory.
I get my hands on her hips.
She makes a sound.