Page 32 of Forbidden Protector

She opens it on the bed. "Sit."

"You planning to ask twice?"

"Once was generous."

I sit. She works my coat off, then the shirt, careful around the arm. Her eyes go down both sleeves of ink and across the scroll on my chest and she doesn't say a word about any of it.

"Ranger years?" Her thumb finds the two round scars high on my shoulder first.

"Two tours."

Her fingers move to the long one down my forearm, the one she noted in the truck from the airport before she ever learned my name. "This isn't service."

"No."

"Going to tell me?"

"Not tonight."

"That's not a no."

"No," I say. "It isn't."

She doesn't push it and threads the needle instead. The first pull draws a line of cold fire straight up my arm that I don't let show on my face. She catches it anyway in the set of my jaw and eases her hand a fraction. Not stopping, just steadier.

"You've done this before," I say.

"Bureau doesn't teach it. I learned it wrong, from a paramedic in Boise who owed me a favor, and I've been doing it wrong ever since." Small, exact stitches. Her breath goes warm and close over my skin every time she leans in to check her work. I feel that more than I feel the needle.

"Doesn't feel wrong."

"That's because you've held worse."

"I've held positions smaller than that gash for three days." I watch the snow go sideways past the black window. "In snow."

She stops with the needle half through. The stove ticks once into the silence, and then she laughs, short and real. I catch myself wanting to say something else just to get it again.

"That's disgusting," she says, "and the first actually funny thing you've said to me."

"Low bar."

"One joke. About lying in the snow."

"Versatile joke."

She ties off the last stitch and doesn't let go of my arm right away. Her thumb settles against the inside of my wrist, right over the pulse, and I feel it land everywhere that isn't my wrist. I don't ask her to move it.

There's one bed. There was never going to be two.

I take the floor.

She looks at me, then at the blood on my sleeve, and doesn't argue it. Just drops the second blanket on me and takes the bed.

There's no upstairs here, no hallway to put between us like there was at the house. Four log walls. One room.

I don't sleep.

I watch the coals go down through the grate and listen to her breathing slow. When I look over, her hand has found her weapon on the floor beside the bed without her waking to do it. Her fingers are curled loose around the grip the way mine do on a rifle stock when I've stopped trusting the dark.