He’s fine.
Physically, he’s fine, aside from a gash on his arm that I stitched up earlier.
I sit back on my heels and look at his face. Dark hair falls across his forehead. There’s a fresh bruise blooming along his cheekbone where someone’s elbow caught him during the restraint. I should note it in my journal, but I don’t reach for the pen. I just look at him. The angle of his jaw. The way his lashes rest against his cheekbones, dark and fine. Features that don’t match what he just did to three trained fighters; there’s something almost elegant about the bones of his face, visible now that the tension has been chemically stripped away.
He’s…beautiful.
The thought lands before I can stop it, and shame follows hard on its heels.
No. He’s unconscious. He’s injured. He’s your patient.
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper, knowing it was my own decision that put him in this predicament. But I just… I had to do something.
Two weeks. That’s how long he’s been here, in this room, under my care. Two weeks of cleaning wounds, changing bandages, monitoring vitals, documenting the extensive damage to his body. Chain marks on his wrists. Suppression runes carved so deep into his skin that they’ve left permanent scarring. Surgical scars on his arms and torso, down his back. A tattooed number on his forearm that I refuse to read because reading it would mean accepting that someone turned him into inventory.
I know this body now. Every injury. Every scar. Every place where pain has left its signature.
I know the old chain marks around his wrists, the places where metal rubbed skin raw and healed badly. I know the suppression runes carved into his ribs, the surgical scars along his arms and torso, the long seam down his back where someone opened him and closed him again. I know the tattoo on his forearm because I have cleaned around it every day and still refuse to read the number unless I have to.
My hand moves to his shoulder to turn him, and stops.
Not long. Not enough for anyone to notice, if anyone were here. Just a break in the rhythm. Cloth, salve, bandage, pulse. That is the order of things. That is the work.
But my palm has settled against the heat of him, and beneath the slack weight of sedation, there is strength. Not vanity. Something built hard and unwilling, muscle layered over bone by years of fighting whatever held him down.
I should move him.
Instead, my thumb shifts against his skin.
A mistake. Barely that. A healer adjusting her grip.
His breath leaves him slowly, warm across my wrist.
My own catches.
For one stupid second, the room narrows to the weight of him under my hand, the dark sweep of lashes against his cheek, the pulse beating steady beneath damaged skin. Then the antiseptic bites the back of my throat, sharp enough to bring me back.
Patient. Wound. Dressing.
I turn him carefully, check the bandage at his side, and make my hands remember what they are for.
That’s the only reason I notice. Except my hands know I’m lying.
And I thought—foolishly, apparently—that knowing the damage meant I could guide the healing.
I might know this body, but I don’t know the man. Nobody does. He’s as much a mystery to us now as he was when he arrived, limp, bewildered, teeth chattering. I’d thought I’d be treating another victim…until the first attack happened. And then the next. Consciousness brings out the beast in him. And he’s uncontrollable.
I pull my kit closer and draw up the full dose. The syringe fills with clear liquid, the same sedative cocktail that’s kept him under since Brenna’s team brought him out of that Syndicatefacility. The same one I reduced a week ago because I believed the standard protocol was doing more harm than good.
Maybe I was right. Maybe I wasn’t. It doesn’t matter now.
“I’m so sorry,” I murmur. I find the vein in his arm, the one I’ve used dozens of times, and slide the needle in. The plunger depresses smoothly. The drug enters his bloodstream, and within seconds his breathing deepens further, slowing into the rhythm that means he’s gone somewhere even dreams can’t reach.
I withdraw the needle, press gauze to the injection site, and dispose of everything properly.
I sit beside him for a long time after I’m done.
My hands are still steady. They’ve been steady since I entered the room. Steadier than they were during Merric’s sutures, steadier than they were in the corridor with Brenna. Some part of me settled when I crouched beside him, and I can’t explain it. Adrenaline drop, probably. The crisis is over. The body comes down.
