She was safe. He would make sure of it.
The fragment came. It always came.
Saevra's face. Not screaming — worse than screaming. Surprised. The eastern wing engulfed. The fire that was his, that had come from the place inside him where the shift lived, that he had lost control of when they came for him and she was simplythere, simply present, simply in the wrong room of the wrong house bonded to the wrong male —
He shut it down. Sealed it. Pressed it back into the vault where it lived alongside thirty years of captivity and a child's broken wing and the sound of his own bones giving way under someone else's hands.
That was ten years ago. He was a different creature. He had Davn, the network, a defensible estate, and a decade of preparation. The perimeter was wired. The staff were trained. He had resources now that the version of himself who lost Saevra could not have imagined.
He looked at November across the table. She was drawing patterns in the sauce on her plate with her spoon, not aware she was doing it. Lost somewhere inside herself.
He would not let anything happen to November.
He said it again to make it sit heavier.
He would not let anything happen to November.
The gashin his flesh was not deep. That was the first thing he assessed, peeling back his shirt in the dim light of the kitchenat an hour when the estate was silent and everyone who should have been asleep was asleep. The young kethral had caught him across the left shoulder — the weak side, always the weak side, the damaged architecture of bone and scar tissue that the universe seemed to find with unerring accuracy. The gripping forelimb had opened a line from the top of his shoulder to just above the wing joint. It bled freely but without urgency.
The youngling was back in its pen. The fence was repaired. The animal was uninjured, just frightened by whatever had driven it through the barrier in the first place — a nightbird, maybe, or a scent on the wind it didn't recognize. Rhaezon had tracked it across the dark plateau terrain for twenty minutes before finding it pressed against a rock outcrop, trembling, its forelimbs extended and scrabbling at the stone. He'd calmed it the way he calmed all the estate animals — with the low, steady authority that full-blooded Drakon projected, the predator-calm that registered as safety rather than threat. The kethral had come to him. In its panic at being guided back through the fence gap, it had thrown itself sideways and caught him with one flailing limb.
He was not going to mention it. He would clean the wound, dress it, and sleep. In the morning there would be no evidence except the bandage beneath his shirt, and he would not have to explain that.
He had the blood seeping down his shoulder half-cleaned, bent over the kitchen basin with a cloth that was already soaked through with dark blood, when the light changed behind him.
"You're bleeding."
November stood in the doorway in whatever she'd been sleeping in — a loose shirt, her hair down, feet bare on the stone floor. Her eyes were on his shoulder, the blood dripping down his biceps. Her eyes were very focused and very awake for someone who should have been asleep for hours.
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing." She crossed the kitchen. She was already gone before he could form the next sentence, disappearing through the washroom door and returning with a medical kit — one of the standard field kits stored throughout the estate. She set it on the table, opened it, and began pulling out its contents.
"You should be asleep. It's late."
She pulled a chair around behind him. "You were gone. I couldn't sleep knowing you weren't here."
The words arrived like a blade between his ribs. Clean, precise, devastating. He wanted to ask the question that formed on his tongue —why?Why would his absence from the estate keep her from sleeping? Why would she notice? Why would she care? But the answer to that question lived in territory he could not afford to enter, and so he sat on the kitchen chair and said nothing.
"Take off your shirt. I can't see what I'm working with."
He hesitated. The kitchen was warm from the residual heat stored in the stone walls, and the single lamp he'd lit threw long shadows across the basin and the bloodied cloth. He could feel the wound pulling when he moved his left arm. She was right. He knew she was right. He pushed past his reluctance and reached for the side fasteners.
The shirt was cut in the Aeltharian style — split along both flanks from hip to underarm, secured with a row of flat metal clasps that allowed the fabric to pass over the wing joints without binding. He worked the left side first, then the right, each clasp releasing with a small click that sounded unreasonably loud in the quiet kitchen. He gathered the loosened fabric and pulled it over his head, careful not to catch the wing membranes, and set it on the table beside the medical kit.
"I always wondered how someone with wings would?—"
She stopped. Her words died somewhere between her mouth and the air.
He felt her go still behind him. He knew what she was seeing. The topography of damage that covered his left side: the burn scarring that crawled from his jaw down the column of his neck and spread across his shoulder like a river delta, the skin puckered and tight where it had healed without proper care, the place where the wing joint met his back in a knot of fused tissue that no longer moved the way it should. And below the scars, other marks — older, less dramatic, the accumulated record of thirty years written in lines and ridges across his back that told their own story to anyone literate enough to read them.
"I can manage." He reached for the cloth in the basin.
"No." The word came out rough. She cleared her throat. "You can't. Not back there. You can't reach it, and even if you could, you can't see what you're doing."
He turned his head just enough to catch her in his peripheral vision. She had pulled her gaze back to the wound. Her jaw was set. Her hands were steady as she reached for the antiseptic.
She was good at this. Not competent — good. Good was the quality of her touch, the way her fingers moved around the wound with a lightness that was also precise, that cleaned without pressing, that managed the tissue rather than attacking it. She worked the way she'd worked with Orin — without hurry, without anxiety, letting her hands communicate something her words didn't need to.
