Page 6 of Alien Healer’s Mate

He steepled his fingers on the desk and built the rationalization the way he’d build a treatment plan. One: she was still recovering from catastrophic head trauma. Two: her neural architecture had undergone a remapping that he couldn’t fully explain, and introducing the additional stress of a mating claim before he understood the implications would be medically irresponsible. Three: she’d just woken from a coma. Dumping a match on top of all that was not caution.

It was cruelty.

Or cowardice.

No, no… Caution was the correct course. Caution was always the correct course when dealing with human patients. He was the Lead Healer of Devan Station. He’d earned his rank through years of clinical discipline and the kind of brutal physical trials that killed one in three candidates before they ever got near a patient. He did not make decisions based on what his cock wanted. He made them based on the evidence.

And the evidence said she wasn’t ready. Not yet.

He was still sitting there, not looking at the buried notification, when the holo emitter on his desk chimed. He looked up, and his eyes widened at the ID tag for the caller.

His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Daaynal K’Saan.

Kellat straightened in his chair. The emperor didn’t call without a reason. Tapping the accept sigil, he waited as the emperor’s image appeared in front of him.

“Your Majesty.”

“Lead Healer.” Daaynal’s voice was rougher than usual, and he looked like he hadn’t slept. His many braids were neat; they were always neat, but there was a tension around his eyes that Kellat recognized. He’d seen it on warriors who’d been in the field too long. “I trust I’m not interrupting anything critical.”

“Indeed not, your majesty.” Kellat leaned back and let his hands rest on the arms of his chair. The posture was deliberate. Relaxed. The emperor didn’t need to know that his Lead Healer had just been sitting in the dark, staring at a door. “What do you need?”

“The human female, Charlotte Mason,” Daaynal said bluntly. “I want an update.”

Kellat was pulling up the file before the emperor had finished the sentence. “She’s healing well. The tissue regeneration around the surgical site is progressing within expected parameters, and the neurological scans came back positive. Another week and I’ll be happy to wake her.”

Daaynal nodded. His expression didn’t change. But Kellat had been reading the emperor’s silences for decades, and he read this one easily: relief mixed with something that looked a lot like guilt.

The reason for the guilt wasn’t hard to find. Daaynal was off-station hunting Purists, the same cell that had taken Lady Emily… the female who’d been matched to one of his own guards instead of him. A bond Daaynal had been, by every account Kellat had heard, quietly relieved to see happen.

Because the emperor looked at Charlotte Mason the way a male looked at his mate.

And Kellat kept that observation where it belonged: behind his teeth. If the emperor wanted to discuss it, he would. Until then, his job was to provide medical updates and not to notice things that weren’t his business. Even if those things were obvious to anyone with eyes in their heads.

“Good. I’ll be back on station within the week,” Daaynal said. “Keep me informed if anything changes.”

“Of course.”

There was a small pause, and Daaynal’s gaze shifted. For a moment, the emperor wasn’t looking at Kellat but at the room behind him.

“Miisan’s not with you.”

It wasn’t a question.

“She had other duties,” Kellat said, which was true in the technical sense and a lie in every sense that mattered. Miisan had probably seen the incoming call and made herself scarce the way she always did when Daaynal reached out. She never said why. She didn’t have to. Everyone knew that the emperor couldn’t bear to look at the AI clone of his dead sister, but only Kellat knew that it cut her every time.

The emperor’s jaw tightened.

“The human you pulled from the wreckage,” he said, shifting topics with an abruptness that meant the previous one was closed. “The Sawyer female. How is she?”

Kellat smiled. “She’s now awake. Today, actually.”

“And?”

Kellat didn’t ask how Daaynal knew. The emperor made it his business to know everything that happened on Devan Station, especially when it involved humans. “And she’s recovering. Neurological function is intact. Motor control is returning. She was lucid when I assessed her.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.”

No. It never was. Daaynal’s interest in the other female was more than transparent. Both females had been kept in induced comas while they healed, even if they were healing from different injuries.