Jeez.Heat flared up her throat. “Pav. I’m checking your wound. That’s all.”
“Oh.”
A slow blink. Like it took effort to process.
“Right.” His mouth tipped into something that might have been a grin on any other man. On him it looked disjointed. He waved his acquiescence. “Go ahead.”
Her stomach dropped. If Pav—controlled and impossible to wrong-foot—was misreading her like this, then this was already bad.
Worse than bad.
She freed her hand from his grip and pushed his shirt open.
The wound had turned.
The butterfly strips she’d placed were lifting at the edges, the adhesive failing against heat and sweat. The skin beneath was angry—red and swollen, radiating heat into her fingertips. The laceration itself was weeping cloudy fluid, the edges soft and angry. Faint red lines branched outward from the wound, tracking beneath the skin in thin, creeping paths.
No.
She sucked in a breath to steady her voice. “Pav. How long has it been like this?”
“It itched.”
Like that explained everything.
She swallowed hard, forced her hands to still as she assessed the heat, the swelling, the spread.
“Pav. Your wound is infected.”
His gaze drifted. “Hmmm?” He came back, slipped again.
“It’s spreading,” she continued, voice sharper now. “You need antibiotics. Without them this becomes sepsis.” She met his gaze. “Sepsis will kill you. Do you understand?”
For a second, he came back to her.
Clear. Focused. The elite operator cutting through the fever.
“There’s a town.” His voice was gravel, dragged up from somewhere deeper than the fever. “Eight klicks east.”
“Klicks?”
“Kilometers.” He swallowed, Adam’s apple bobbing with the effort. “Five miles. We can make it.”
Like failure wasn’t part of the plan.
Even if his body had other ideas.
25
The fever livedbehind his eyes, a hot, persistent pressure that turned the forest unreliable—edges blurring, depth flickering, the tactical overlay he normally laid across terrain arriving a fraction too late—as if the system was lagging behind the world.
Pav adjusted without breaking stride.
Harper moved beside him now, matching his pace with a quiet determination that would have annoyed him under any other circumstances. Her attention was fixed on him with a clinical focus that missed nothing—the sweat sheening his skin, the slight deviation in his line, the moments where his focus slipped and then locked back into place.
She was tracking his deterioration in real time, and he didn’t like it. But he also couldn’t stop her, and he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to.
The route to the town sat clean in his head. Five miles through descending forest, a valley road, then the settlement. Terrain, elevation, choke points—all laid out with the same clarity they always had.
