Page 16

“I really don’t want to call them in here,” I said, looking to the doors where guards would be waiting.

“So please behave… For me.” I don’t know why I was insane enough to add this last part, or the reason I allowed it to come out breathy the way it did. But it was done now and because of it something flickered across his face.

“For me.” He said it back to me, slowly and on a breath that was almost a sigh. Like nobody had ever asked him for anything before, unless it was begging him to let them live.

And then he moved.

His good hand went out and closed around the bed rail, and his knuckles went white on it, and that arm was done. Then he reached down with the injured arm, fingers finding the chain where it hung slack off the frame. He then gathered it up into his fist a length at a time until there was none of it left loose. Only then did he turn the arm over. The whole ruined inside of his forearm lay open along the cot with his fist closed tight around the chain beneath it and the last of the slack pulled hard against the frame. The arm went flat and stayed flat, locked out by his own hand, and it could not have moved if he had wanted it to.

He had just tied himself down with his own chain and without being asked.

“Then have at it, little nurse,” he told me, nodding down at his injury.

“I will not move,” he added, when I still hadn’t picked up the needle. “You have my word.” His word… as though that should mean a single thing.

But honestly, somehow… it did.

“Thank you,” I said and God help me, I believed him.

So, I went back to doing my job. I tested the wound edge with forceps and got nothing back, which meant the block had taken, and then I opened the suture pack and started closing him.

Nine of them in the end. Interrupted sutures, which meant nine separate knots, each one tied and cut on its own before I started the next. Worked from the middle out, the way I was taught. And every single one of them was a needle going through a man who could have taken my throat out with the arm I was holding still. My fingers stayed steady and I had no idea how.

And the whole time he kept himself exactly where he had put himself, one fist white on the rail and the other closed around a chain he was holding tight on my behalf. The chains never once moved. What surprised me more was that he talked the entire way through, that deep voice of his filling the quiet while I sewed. And it wasn’t idle talk, either.

Questions.

Dangerous questions.

“So, Miss Vale.” He said the name slowly, turning it over on his tongue, and there was something underneath it. Like he could feel the weight of the lie sitting under it. As though he could feel the seams where it had been stitched together wrong, like some cheap knockoff.

“Do you live local?”

I kept my eyes on his arm and my face on nothing at all. I didn’t react to the way he said my name. I wouldn’t give him that, but when he asked where I lived, my eyes lifted to his. Just for half a second, before I could stop them, but it was enough.

“You don’t expect me to answer that, do you?” I scoffed and the corner of his mouth curved.

“Not if you’re smart, no,” he admitted, his smirk deepening.

“Then I guess that’s your answer,” I replied before I dropped my gaze back to his arm and kept working. And he let me… for the moment. He simply watched me as I tied off the last of them, cut the thread, and smoothed a dressing into place over all of it with that patient, unblinking attention that made my skin feel a size too tight.

“A nurse,” he said at last.

“One who lives local. Skips her breakfast. And is addicted to candy.” Forget skipping breakfast. Now it was my heart that skipped.

“I never said I lived local.” It was out before I had thought it through, and I felt the trap shut the second it left me.

“No.” He agreed far too easily, far too pleased.

“But you did skip breakfast. And you are, most definitely, addicted to sugar… I can smell it on you, little nurse,” he said, as he leaned in and breathed me in again, then hummed low in his throat. The sheer closeness of him froze me where I stood, and heat climbed my neck and bloomed across my face, quick and traitorous. Oh, and his eyes followed every inch of it like a man watching a sunrise he had ordered specially.

But he didn’t touch me again. Not once. He had said he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. And somehow that frightened me more than if he had broken his word, because it meant every last bit of this was a choice.

I peeled my gloves off, stepped back out of his long, quiet reach, and finally let myself breathe.

“There, I’m finished, you’ll live,” I said before adding,

“Try not to make any more friends.” Although even after I said it, I knew that when it came to the restraints, those hadn’t been the type of friends he had been talking about. His knowing grin confirmed this.