Page 60 of Enslak

The creature went limp.

Enslak released it and let the current take it. He stood in the middle of the river for a long moment, chest heaving, blood running from the claw marks across his arms and mixing with the water.

Then he turned to look at me.

I flinched.

I didn't mean to. It was pure reflex, involuntary, my nervous system responding to the sight of him covered in blood from his face to his waist, eyes still burning with the intensity of the fight.

The moment it happened, I saw him register it.

His expression shifted in a way that made my chest ache. The battle-focus drained away, replaced by something quieter and more painful. His shoulders dropped slightly, his massive frame somehow making itself smaller, and he began moving toward the shore with the deliberate care of someone trying not to startle an animal.

"Enslak. No." I stepped forward, ignoring the scream of protest from my injured leg. "It was the blood. Just the blood, it startled me for a second. I'm not afraid of you."

He didn't look entirely convinced.

"Look at me." I waited until his eyes met mine. "I'm not afraid of you. I have never been afraid of you. Not once. Not for a single second of any day we've spent on this planet."

Something in his expression shifted, not quite belief yet, but the door opening to it.

He looked away from my face, down at himself, and seemed to see what I'd seen. Then he turned back to the river and submerged himself, scrubbing at his face and chest and arms with focused efficiency until the water around him ran clear.

When he came back to shore, he was just Enslak. Wet, with the scratches from the creature's claws already beginning to close, his gold eyes finding mine across the distance between us.

He knelt beside me and his hands moved to my calf with a gentleness that was hard to square with what I'd just watched him do. He examined the wound carefully, his brow drawn together, and I saw the moment he made a decision, because he rose and moved to the tree line and came back with broad leaves from a plant I didn't recognize. When he pressed them against my wound, they were cool and faintly sticky, and within a minute a numbing sensation spread through my leg like something releasing.

The pain receded to a manageable throb.

He worked quietly and efficiently, layering more leaves over the wound, then tearing strips from his own clothing to bind them in place. His hands were steadier than mine would have been. I watched the concentration on his face and thought about all the things that must have happened to him that had given him this particular set of skills.

When he finished, he sat back and looked at me directly, a question in his eyes.

"I'm okay," I said, my voice steadier than I felt. "You got there in time."

He watched my face like he was checking the statement against something internal.

"I mean it. I'm okay." I held his gaze. "Are you?"

He glanced down at the claw marks on his arms, already healing faster than any human wound would, and made a sound that meant yes, these are minor.

He lifted me carefully, mindful of my injured leg, and carried me back toward the cave. I let him. My leg was throbbing through the numbness, my whole body had the shaky aftermath quality of an adrenaline crash, and the warmth of his chest against my cheek was one of the more stabilizing things I'd felt in recent memory.

The walk back passed in a quiet that felt companionable rather than empty.

When we reached the cave, he settled me onto the bedding and retrieved the medi-kit with the ease of someone who knew where everything was, which he did, because he'd organized the supplies on our second day here and had never once rearranged them. He cleaned the wound properly, applied antiseptic, ran the scanner over it, and wrapped my calf with careful, even pressure.

I watched him work and felt the thing that had been building in my chest since he'd walked out of that river start to push against my ribs.

"Thank you," I said.

He looked up from the bandage.

"Not just for today," I said. "For all of it. The hunting and the fire and the flowers and the way you've been so patient with me when I needed space even though it clearly drove you insane."

Something shifted in his expression, a warmth that he didn't yet have the words to explain but that came through regardless.

And then, without planning it, without a single moment of rational deliberation, I was crying.