Page 34 of Blood & Bone

June set her kit on the side table. Opened it. Pulled gloves from the box inside and worked them onto her hands without looking at Luca’s face.

“How long ago?” she asked.

“Twenty minutes,” Luca said. His voice was warm. Direct. The same register he used for everything. “Maybe thirty. I walked from the turnoff.”

“Did you lose consciousness?”

“No.”

“Is the numbness spreading? Fingers, arm, chest.”

He flexed his left hand. Opened it. Closed it. “No numbness. Pain is localized. Radiating, but contained.”

She nodded once. The gloves settled against her skin. She reached for the portable light, plugged it into the wall outlet beside the cot, and aimed the beam at the wound. The light was whiter than the overhead. It caught the edges of the hole and showed what Marcus had missed: a dark line running diagonally through the tissue, about an inch deep, where something had broken off and stayed behind.

“Splinter,” she said. Not to Luca. To the room. “About three centimeters. Following the grain.”

Marcus stood at the foot of the cot. His weight was on both feet. His face showed nothing. “I tried forceps. Couldn’t get purchase without better light.”

“Hold the lamp,” June said.

He took the light. Held it steady on the wound. June selected forceps from her kit, curved, fine-tipped, the kind used for sutures or foreign bodies. She bent over Luca’s shoulder, close enough to feel the temperature difference between his skin and the room and made herself think about the wound and nothing else. The blood smell was stronger close up. Metallic. Warm. She worked the forceps into the wound along the track the splinter had left, feeling for resistance with the tips, and found it eight millimeters in.

The fragment came out on the third try. Wood. Oak grain, from the look of it. About three centimeters long, tapered at one end where it had broken from the main stake. Dark with blood along its length, the grain swollen from moisture, the broken edge rough and splintered. She held it up in the portable light. Turned it once. Set it on the metal tray beside the wet bandages without comment.

The bleeding had slowed to almost nothing. That pulled her attention. She’d been deep in the work. Forceps, track, retrieval, the mechanical sequence of removing something that didn’t belong. And had forgotten, as medical personnel sometimes forgot when the problem was interesting, that the body on her table was not human. The wound edges were closing. Not dramatically. Nothing like the movies. Just a slow, visible contraction of tissue that human wounds didn’t do in forty minutes, or four hours, or sometimes four days. The hole was smaller than it had been when she’d aimed the light. The seep had reduced to a thin film that glistened under the lamp and did not run.

She stripped her gloves. Dropped them in the biohazard bin Marcus kept by the door. Her hands were steady. They always were. She’d been doing this long enough that steady was the default and anything else required explanation.

“Can you feel your fingers?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Good.” She reached for an alcohol pad from her kit. Wiped the forceps. Set them back in their slot. “You need to eat something.”

The word caught. Half a second. She meant blood. She didn’t have a clinical term for it that fit the carriage house, the metal tray, the splinter lying in its own stain. Blood was the word. It sat between them on the treatment cot while she wiped down the tray edge and avoided looking at Luca’s face.

“I’ll manage,” he said.

She didn’t push it. Started cleaning up. Gauze into the bin. Antiseptic bottle recapped. The portable light went back into her kit. Her hands moved through the sequence they’d moved through a thousand times after a thousand procedures, and the habit carried her through the moment where the word had caught and left a silence in its wake. She didn’t look at him while she worked. She didn’t need to. She could feel the particular quality of a man watching her hands with an attention that had stopped being about the wound several minutes ago.

Then she stopped.

Her wrist was there. She had a wrist. The wound was closing but slower than it should be, and she had read enough. Not in medical journals, in books Sebastian kept on shelves nobody was supposed to touch. To know what helped. Not dramatically. Not like something out of a story. Just a practical exchange between two people in a room where one of them was bleeding and the other wasn’t.

She laid her right wrist across the table between them. Palm up. The veins showed blue under the skin. She didn’t frame it. Didn’t perform it. Didn’t say anything about what it meant or didn’t mean or might mean under different circumstances. She just placed her wrist on the metal and kept her eyes on the tray where the splinter lay in its own drying stain.

Luca looked at her. Long enough that she felt it without turning her head. Then he looked at the wound. Then back at her wrist. His hand came across the table. His fingers were cool. Dry. They closed around her forearm below the wrist, not hard, the grip of someone who had done this before and knew exactly how much pressure was required and how much was excess.

He bent his head. His mouth found the inside of her wrist.

The first touch was almost careful. Cool lips against warm skin. Then his teeth pierced her, and June’s breath caught hard enough to hurt.

She had expected pain. There was some: a sharp, clean sting followed by the deep pull of his mouth. But she hadn’t expected the heat that came with it. It traveled up her arm and spread across her chest, tightening her nipples beneath her shirt before sinking lower.

Straight between her legs.

Her fingers curled against the metal table.