She glances up at me, unimpressed. “You’ve also got at least three cracked ribs, significant bruising across your chest, and a concussion, if the way your pupils are reacting means anything.” She pauses, then adds dryly, “Which it usually does.”
“Great.”
“Fantastic, actually. Could’ve been worse.”
She starts cataloguing everything out loud as she works, partly for her own notes and partly, I suspect, to keep me conscious.
“Deep tissue bruising along the spine. Cuts across the shoulders. Ligature marks around the wrists.” She frowns faintly. “And I’m guessing dehydration.”
“Not sure how long I was there,” I say quietly.
“Four days,” Varek answers, his voice snagging.
Her eyes flick up again. “That explains the tremors.”
Varek hasn’t moved since he set me down. He stands close enough that his presence fills half the room, his broad frame looming beside the table like a wall. Every so often his gaze flicks to Iris’s hands when she touches me, tracking the movements with that same intense focus he had in the courtyard.
He looks like he wants to intervene every thirty seconds.
Iris notices. “If you hover any closer,” she says without looking at him, “you’re going to block the light.”
Varek doesn’t move.
She sighs. “Fine. Be useless somewhere slightly to the left.”
He shifts half a step. Barely.
I close my eyes briefly, letting my head fall back against the thin pillow as she continues working. My mind drifts unwillingly back to the courtyard, to the Queen’s cold amusement, to the soldiers. To Aelith standing there with his hands bound, his expression carved from stone.
Dawson beside him, looking entirely too cheerful for a man standing in the middle of a royal hostage exchange.
And then the moment we walked away.
“The prince stayed behind,” I say quietly.
Iris pauses briefly but keeps working.
Varek answers after a moment. “Yes.”
“That was the deal?”
“Yes.”
I stare at the ceiling. The cracked paint above me swims slightly in my vision. “They’re still there.”
“Yes.”
I drop my gaze and catch the muscle that jumps in Varek’s jaw. I let out a slow breath.
The image of Aelith facing his mother in that courtyard sits uneasily in the back of my mind, but the alternative had been worse.
A lot worse.
Iris finishes fixing the temporary brace around my arm and begins cleaning the dried blood from a cut along my jaw.
For a while the only sound in the room is the clink of medical tools and the quiet rhythm of her instructions.
“Hold still.”
