Page 10 of Alien Healer’s Mate

“Are you hungry?”

3

Kellat smelled Delilah before he saw her… grease, salt, and under it that warm floral note that had been plaguing him since she’d arrived in his medical bay.

He came around the corner of the plaza half-braced to find her collapsed on the tile, blood in her hair, brain hemorrhaging from whatever she’d torn loose when she’d run from medical.

Instead she was sitting on a stool with a fry halfway to her mouth.

Whole and upright. Laughing at something the half-ketalli boy behind the counter had said.

The relief hit him so hard his knees went loose for half a step. And then, just as fast, it curdled into something that snarled.

She’d walked out of medical bay just hours post-coma with no monitoring, no escort, into a public concourse full of strangers who had no reason to be gentle with a human female. And she was eating fries.

“I didn’t touch her.” The young male behind the counter was already backing toward the grill, his hands up and his black eyes wide. “I swear it, my lord healer, I didn’t⁠—”

Delilah was off the stool before Kellat said a word, planting herself between him and the server like she thought he meant to put a fist through the counter.

“Move,” he growled.

“He didn’t do anything.” She stabbed the fry toward him. “He fed me. That’s it. So whatever you’re about to do, you can do it to me instead of scaring the poor guy half to death.”

“Then you can explain to me,” he said, his voice dangerously low, “why a patient with active neural remapping and no cleared discharge is sitting in a public plaza three sectors from medical… unsupervised.”

“I got hungry.”

“You got lost,” he said. “You could have collapsed. You could have seized. Your brain has been rewriting itself for days, and you decided the best use of your first hour awake was to run off?”

“I decided the best use of my first hour awake was to not stare at a ceiling tile until I lost my mind.” She didn’t back down an inch, chin up, fry still pointed at his chest. “Nobody died. I’m fine. Look at me. Fine.”

He glared down at her. “You are not qualified to determine that.”

She glared right back. “And you’re not qualified to boss me around like I’m a toddler who wandered off at the mall.”

Kellat blinked, surprise rolling through him. Nobody argued with him like that. He opened his mouth to say so then snapped it shut.

“Your sister asked me to keep you safe,” he said. “She trusted me to watch over you while she can’t. What do you think it would do to her, knowing you ran the moment my back was turned?”

Delilah went white. Not pale but white, the color draining out of her face so fast he thought for one horrible second that he’d been right about the seizure risk after all and she was actually about to collapse.

“That’s a shitty thing to say,” she said, looking like he’d hit her.

It was. He’d known it the moment it left his mouth, but he couldn’t claw the words back now. The win sat in his chest like a stone.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

“I’m not finished yet!” she said, turning her back on him and shoving a couple more fries into her mouth.

Lady, give him strength. “You are now.”

Closing a hand around her upper arm, he turned her toward the door.

“Hey! Let go of me, you asshole!” She yelped and lunged sideways, snagging the paper bag of fries off the counter with her free hand, hugging it to her chest like he might try to wrestle it off her too.

“You are such a jerk,” she announced as he managed to get her out of the door, loud enough that heads turned two stalls down. “You know that? A giant, bossy, freaking bully.”

His jaw tightened. Junior healers didn’t speak to him like this. Warriors twice her size didn’t speak to him like this. He was Lead Healer of Devan Station, V’Raav of the V’Raav line, and this tiny human female was hauling a bag of fried potatoes down the concourse behind him and calling him names in front of the entire civilian sector like he was some errand boy who’d overstepped.