Page 25 of Hallowed Bones

I scowl. “It’s a nosebleed, not a broken bone,” I tell him, reaching up to catch some of the blood that’s sliding over my mouth. Copper and rust don’t exactly taste great on an empty stomach, and I hadn’t eaten more than a fry or two from lunch.

“You can either go willingly,” Reyes replies, “or…” His words taper off as his eyes darken and move down my body. I stifle the urge to shiver. Maybe Liz was right and I need to get laid. “Unwillingly,” he finishes with a shrug as he reaches into the bag slung over his shoulder and yanks out a few tissues. “Here, hold these to your nose and tilt your head forward.”

Willingly or … unwillingly? What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Instead of asking, however, I jolt at the contact he makes with the back of my head, cupping it and directing my face forward and down this time. The tissues are in my hand and pressed to my face in the next instant and I don’t even know how he managed it.

“Forward?” I ask.

“Tilting your head back can cause the blood to go into your throat,” he states.

“How would you know that?” I peer up at him without fully lifting my head.

His lips twitch. “I got injured a lot as a kid,” he says absently, gaze locked on the bloody tissues in my hand. “But a lot of people know that.”

“How did you get injured?” It’s almost impossible to side-eye him with his wide palm cupping the back of my neck, but I manage it.

He bends to meet my gaze, and I go still as he grins at me. His striking looks only irritate me further as my stomach warms and my thighs clench together. “I think I’ll let you figure that out on your own,” he says. “How do you feel?”

I roll my eyes, ignoring the signs of my own body. “I said I was fine.”

He nods, that smile still twitching at the corners of his lips. “Unwillingly, I take it, then?”

“Wha—”

Despite the fact that he’d worded his statement like a question, it’s clear by his actions that it isn’t. Reyes doesn’t give me a chance to resist as he sweeps my feet out from under me. I land against his chest with a loud oomph and a hand smacking into his pec.

Brick. Granite. Concrete. He can’t be human because he’s far too … hard. He has to be a man made from pure stone. Still, I resist pushing against him in a bid to be released. “I don’t need—”

“Stubbornness will get you nowhere with me,” Reyes says dryly as he keeps walking, striding away from the courtyard with me, his bag, and my own dangling from his arms.

Half ready to throw my bloody tissues in his face before kicking it, I glare back at him. “I’m the stubborn one?” I bite out. “You’re—”

Reyes casually adjusts his hold as we reach a set of stone steps, and he quickly jogs down, jostling me in a way that cuts off the insult I’m ready to lob at him before it can even form. I stew in my rage as he moves quickly and as if I weigh nothing to him. Any other guy, and I’d think he was trying to prove a point about his masculinity or strength. Reyes doesn’t even seem to notice my attention to his muscled arms, contracting and flexing beneath his shirt against my side and back as he faces forward and strides with purpose.

Infuriating. Condescending. Bullheaded. Fucking. Man.

We arrive at the infirmary to find the doctor, a dark-skinned woman in a white coat, standing next to a pair of gray filing cabinets with a clipboard in hand. Her eyes widen as she takes in my predicament with an amused look. At least one of us finds this funny. Then she spies the blood-soaked tissue in my hand and sets her work down.

The woman jumps right into doctor mode. “What happened?”

Reyes carries me over to a chair and sets me down, slipping my bag off my shoulder and holding it in his hand. “My fault, Dr. Davies,” he tells her, standing back to give her room to examine me. “I ran into her.”

The woman—Dr. Davies, I presume—hums in the back of her throat as she nudges the tissues from my face and looks at my nose. “Well, it’s not too bad,” she says. I glare right at Reyes as if to tell him that I was right all along. Not that he notices. The prick. His attention is on the doctor.

“The bleeding seems to have stopped for the most part,” she says, and then meets my gaze as if to make it clear that she’s talking directly to me this time. “You might have a bit of a headache later, though.”

I try to tell her that it won’t be a big deal when Reyes jumps in. “Is there something you can give her for that?”

Dr. Davies’s mouth twitches, and I count backward from one hundred by sevens. I heard it’s a good way to manage any emotion, and though I’ve used it mostly for anxiety attacks and depression in the past, I’m hopeful that it’ll also be a good weapon against murderous rage.

“I’ll go see what we have in terms of over-the-counter painkillers.” As Dr. Davies disappears around a curtain, I turn the full brunt of my annoyance on Reyes.

He rolls his eyes and plucks the bloodied tissues from my hand to toss them into a nearby trash can, I assume. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, shortcake,” he says. “If it hurts, you should take something for it. It’s not the end of the world.”

My glare doesn’t cease. In fact, I double down on it. “Shortcake?” I grit out the ridiculous nickname between clenched teeth.

He grins and then motions between the two of us with the flat of his hand. “Yeah,” he says. “Shortcake—as in, the obvious difference between me and the vertically challenged, aka you.”

Did I think that Reyes was the nice one of the Sons of Salem? Obviously, that was a misconception. He’s rude, presumptuous, and—