Page 66 of Blades and Bone

He turned his hands, inspecting the smears of dried blood. It wasn’t too bad. It wasn’t like after the raid in Albany. But he didn’t get up.

Couldn’t.

He’d survived and helped get rid of the evidence, and now he needed to just sit and be still because everything else was too hard. It was shock and trauma, and he knew that. But it didn’t make him smart enough to find a shortcut.

Brodie stood and walked over and held out his hand. “Come on.”

“You aren’t worried I’ll kill you in your sleep?”

“We already had this conversation and agreed that the treaty was more important.”

“It’s nice to know where I stand.” A carefully negotiated agreement was why his life mattered.

Brodie exhaled. “Do I like this cold, killer side of you? No, but I don’t think you do either. It’s not who you want to be. It is someone you learned to be, and I’m grateful for that because we are both still alive.” He took half a step closer, hand still outstretched.

All Hamish had to do was lift his hand. For how long would Brodie stand there waiting for him to get his shit together?

“Use your words, Hamish.”

“You’re offering to help, and I want to accept…but it means admitting that I’m weak, which is not something you want to do in my family.” He shouldn’t even be saying that stuff, but so far Brodie hadn’t judged him for anything.

“Good thing your old family isn’t watching then. It’s just me.”

“I can’t lift my hand. I can’t move yet.”

“Why? Are you punishing yourself by sitting in the corner?”

He’d never thought of it that way. He thought he’d needed the time alone, not to process, but to block out and sweep under the rug what had happened. “Maybe.”

“You don’t get to decide that. I do. And you did good. You fought off one attacker, and you obeyed every order you were given.” Brodie bent down and grabbed Hamish’s hand. “Or is that the problem? You shut down so you can obey?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “You know more about me than I do.”

“I doubt that. I think you still have plenty of secrets.” He gave Hamish a tiny tug as if testing how stuck he was.

“Why are you helping? You could just leave me alone.”

“No. I can’t go back to bed while you’re sulking in the corner.”

“I’m not sulking.”

“Sulking, indulging in self-loathing, trying to work out if you could’ve done things differently…the result is ultimately the same. You’re miserable, and nothing changes. So you’re going to get up, and you’re going to have a shower.”

“You’re only obligated not to kill me because of the treaty. I saw the way you looked at me when I came in, like a rotted corpse had washed up on your beach and you needed to deal with it before anyone else saw it.”

“It was a side of you I hadn’t seen, even though I knew it existed. And will always exist. That doesn’t mean I like that side, or that it doesn’t trouble me, but I am glad that it exists, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” Brodie gave his hand a much firmer pull, and Hamish didn’t resist, allowing himself to be pulled to his feet.

Resisting required far too much effort.

Brodie didn’t give him a chance to even stand still, leading him to the ensuite as if he didn’t want to break the newfound momentum, and it was easier to go along with it than to fight.

“It’s interesting that you described yourself as a rotting corpse,” Brodie said as he turned on the shower with his free hand.

“Not really. What else is disgusting and inconvenient and terrifying to most people?”

Brodie released his hand and pulled his T-shirt off, and Hamish let him. “We are going to have to talk about the way you think about yourself.”

Hamish shrugged. What did that matter? It wasn’t as though Brodie could get inside his head. It would take someone far better at ensorcellment than him to do that.