He sets me carefully on the broad stone vanity, keeping one hand at my waist until he’s certain I’m steady enough to sit alone.
The female staring back from the mirror doesn’t look like me.
Dried blood streaks one side of my face and disappears into tangled locs. My lower lip is swollen, the split crusted dark against my skin. Bruises have already begun blooming beneath my collarbone and along my arms where Father’s enforcers held me down. My shirt hangs in torn strips, stiff with blood, and the claw wound beneath it has bled through the fabric in an ugly rust-colored stain.
A tremor starts in my fingertips. I curl them into my palms, but it only spreads, travelling up my wrists, into my shoulders, down through my legs until every muscle shudders.
“I...” My voice catches. “Why can’t I stop shaking?”
Zavin takes both my hands in his, enclosing them so completely that my trembling fingers disappear between his larger ones. “You’re in shock. Your body’s finally realized it’s safe.”
I swallow hard, trying to force the shaking away. “I... I can’t stop.” The more I try to stop, the harder the shaking grows.
“Just think about this. Your hands in mine. My touch. We’re in the bathroom. The air is warm.”
The pads of his thumbs are smooth, and the pressure is impossibly gentle. I concentrate on that warmth, on the solid weight of him standing in front of me instead of the memories trying to drag me back into Father’s office.
“That’s it,” he murmurs. “Stay here with me.”
Another breath comes easier than the last. The shaking doesn’t vanish, but it loosens its grip. Only then does he reach for the ruined edge of my shirt. “Let’s get this off so I can see your wounds.”
He peels the torn fabric away from my shoulder a fraction at a time, making sure nothing catches against the wound beneath. As more of the injury comes into view, the warmth leaves his expression.
Heat blooms beneath the fine scales along his neck, and I recognize that dangerous stillness that settled over him when he walked into Father’s office.
His gaze never leaves the wound. “If I could kill that male again, I’d make him suffer for weeks.”
He turns to the medical cabinet, retrieving a compact kit with the ease of someone who’s done this far too many times. I keep my eyestrained on his face while he numbs the fiery wound, and then I feel nothing but pressure as he disinfects and seals it.
My gaze drifts over his torn clothing, clinging to broad shoulders streaked with drying blood. Fresh cuts mark the powerful muscles of his chest and side, and one deeper wound near his ribs has bled through the bandage he’d apparently forgotten to replace.
“You’re hurt too.”
He glances down as though I’d pointed out someone else’s injuries. “I’ll heal faster than you, little human. I have thick Sethrai scales. Not delicate human skin like yours.”
His fingertips drift lightly along my forearm, checking for tenderness near another bruise. The touch is feather-light, but warmth spreads through my skin and I can’t stop the small shiver that follows.
His eyes lift. “Does your delicate human skin like my touch?”
The severity leaves his face, replaced by something softer that I’ve learned belongs only to me. His thumb traces the same path a second time, slower now, and I lean into the touch, forgetting, if only for a moment, every bruise reflected in the mirror behind me.
“It likes it very much,” I manage.
“Good.” His gaze travels over me, slow and deliberate, taking in every smear of blood and grime. “Because this delicate human body needs to be cleaned just as badly as my powerful Sethrai body does.”
A startled laugh escapes me. “Powerful?”
“You disagree.” His voice drops, and the sound of it sends a warm pulse through my belly. “Then allow me to demonstrate how powerful I am.”
His claw hooks through the center of my bra and slices downward in one clean motion. The ruined fabric falls away before I can draw breath. He tears my pants open at the seam, the harsh rip filling the small bathroom. I step free of the scraps, completely bare.
The air hits my skin and I forget to be self-conscious because he’s already reaching behind his neck and drawing his ruined shirt away. His pants follow in the same breath, shoved down and kicked aside.
He reaches past me and turns the dial. Water thunders against the stone floor and steam billows outward immediately, filling the small bathroom in a single warm breath. The air thickens, hazing the mirrors and wrapping around us both, and through it he turns back to me.
His skin burns a deep burnt orange beneath the smears of dried blood that paint his chest and shoulders, darkening to bronze across the stacked ridges of his abdomen and the broad plane of his chest. Scales catch the glow in shifting patterns where they aren’t streaked red, fine as silk at his throat, thicker and darker where they armor his shoulders and trace a path down the center of his stomach. The wound at his ribs is a dark gash. I follow that bloodied trail past the narrow waist, past the powerful thighs braced wide and steady, to his thick, heavy and fully erect twin cocks.
They rise thick and heavy, the upper curving slightly toward his stomach while the lower hangs heavier beneath. His tail sways low behind him, the spaded tip flicking once as he catches me looking.
