Speaking to Nina is a gift I have given myself over the last three weeks, one syllable at a time, her patience making space for mine. Speaking to a room is like surgery without anesthesia. The words came out clean because I didn't let them come out any other way. But the cost sits in me now, behind my ribs, a bruise the shape of everything I've never said.
I run the cold tap. Cup water in my hands and splash my face. My horns ache at the base. Some old nerve firing. Fifteenyears of the muzzle strap, a memory my body keeps without my permission.
I straighten. Look at the mirror. A big man with wet fur and eyes I recognise from photographs taken at the wrong end of his life.
Pretty little nurse.
I shut the tap.
The cabin is warm when I push the door open.
The fire has burned down to coals. Nina is asleep on the couch, a textbook open across her,Advanced Wound Care, Fourth Edition.Her sock feet stick out from under the quilt. She has drooled a little at the corner of her mouth.
My throat does something I don't have a word for.
I ease the door shut behind me. Hang my cut on the hook. Cross the floor on the balls of my feet.
I lift the textbook off her. Set it beside the half-drunk tea she made hours ago. Pull the quilt up to her chin and she shifts. Her hand comes free of the blanket, finds the edge of the couch, slides off.
I lower myself onto the floor beside her, back against the base of the couch, knees drawn up. The fur along my shoulders brushes the edge of the cushion.
Her hand finds me in her sleep.
Her fingers curl around the base of my left horn the way they've learned to curl around it. Automatic now, after these last weeks. Her thumb settles into the groove at the base.
The purr starts before I can decide whether to let it.
It rolls through me, into the couch frame behind me. Her hand shifts a fraction against my horn and settles deeper. Her breathing slows.
I watch the fire.
The scout is out there. The clan is out there. My past is in a Spokane warehouse with a ledger and a phone number waiting for a call I will never make, and the man who came for me is driving home tonight to report back, and the Kuznetsov family will decide what comes next.
But the feel of Nina's thumb in the groove of my horn is soothing.
I have spent my life protecting nothing because I had nothing worth protecting. I understand it now, on the floor of my own cabin with her hand on my horn and the fire dying in the grate. I have a thing. A thing with a heartbeat and a laugh and socked feet under a quilt. A thing I can lose.
The purr deepens and I let it carry me into the dark.
Chapter 9
Nina
The carving knife moves in his hands by the fire, pale curls dropping onto the cloth across his knee. He's been at it for twenty minutes. I've been at the kitchen counter with my coffee going cold, watching his hands instead of the textbook open in front of me, working up the nerve to ask the question I've been sitting on since last night.
He told me about the pits. The muzzle. The handlers who called him by a number. He told me in pieces, over two days, each word dragged up through scar tissue and laid on the kitchen table between us like bone fragments he'd been carrying in his pockets for years. I listened the way I listen to patients in post-op who need to talk before the morphine drip takes them under. Without flinching. Without the pity he kept bracing for, his shoulders drawing in each time he offered up a new detail, waiting for me to break.
I didn't break. I'm a trauma nurse. I know what survivors look like, and I know the difference between someone who needs saving and someone who already saved himself and needs to be seen.
But there's one thing he hasn't told me.
"Why do people call you Gore?"
The knife stops.
His grip tightens on the block of wood. The purr that's been running low in his chest cuts out.
I wait.
