Page 82 of The CEO Alpha’s Substitute Mate

“No.”

He makes a satisfied sound in his throat, gets in beside me on top of the covers with his shirt still buttoned, and starts reading a report about port fees. I turn onto my good side facing away from him, telling myself I’ll sleep in twenty minutes if I’m bored enough.

Somewhere around the second page, his hand comes into my hair. His eyes stay on the screen with his thumb going through the same piece of hair over and over, sorting it, letting it fall, sorting it again. I lie completely still with my heart going and don’t say a word in case he stops.

I don’t know when I fall asleep, but when I come to, there’s a stinging sensation on my leg. It’s cold, and it’s moving across my thigh, so I get one eye open. There’s a single lamp on. Callum is sitting on the edge of the bed with the covers folded back off my leg and a jar open on his knee, working salve into the skin around the stitches with two fingers.

“Sleep.” He doesn’t look up. “I’m putting ointment on the wound.”

“You don’t have to do that.” My mouth isn’t working properly, so the words come out joined together.

“Go to sleep.”

I do.

When I open my eyes again, the sun is across the ceiling with his side of the bed empty. My leg is stiff, but the burn underneath it has dropped to something I can ignore for minutes at a time, and when I lift the sheet, the skin at the edges of the stitches has lost its shine.

I lie there for a long time. Callum was applying medicine to my leg last night. The alpha, the one everyone is terrified of, coated my injury with salve.

My heart trembles, and I turn on my side, burying my head in the pillows.

Chapter 16

Callum

Salar has taped four films of Ariela’s leg to the study window because the light coming through it beats anything he keeps in his bag. He’s been talking for a quarter of an hour about tissue depth, and my coffee went cold somewhere in the middle of it.

“The surface is the ugliest part.” He taps the top film with a knuckle. “Under that, the muscle came back together better than I had any right to expect, and the vessel is holding. What she sees in the mirror every morning is scar tissue doing its job badly. What’s underneath it is close to whole.”

“Then tell her that.”

“I did tell her that. She thanked me and changed the subject.” He works one film off the glass and holds it up on its own. “Alpha, there’s something else.”

He puts the new film against the window, stands aside for me, and waits. I get up and go to it. The image means nothing to me on its own, so I keep quiet, which he knows because he already has his pen out, and he draws a slow oval in the air over a pale ridge along the inside of the joint.

“This is the right knee, the old damage.” His pen doesn’t move. “When she came in, I read her history. Two years ago, a surgeon went into that knee and did what could be done, which wasn’t much. There was structural damage that doesn’t repair itself in a human being. It’s supposed to stay exactly as it was on the day it happened. That knee hasn’t stayed. Some of it has closed.”

The room goes quiet around the noise of the grounds crew somewhere below the window. “My magic went in through an open wound in the thigh, and it went looking for the nearest broken thing,” Salar continues. “I didn’t send it. The knee found it on its own, because that’s a healer’s instinct rather than a healer’s decision, and human tissue holds our work differently. It sits in there longer than it would in one of us. I’ve never treated a human before her, so I’m telling you what I see rather than what I know.”

“Say the rest of it.”

“If it keeps closing, and if she does the rehabilitation properly, with a physical therapist who understands what that knee used to do for a living”—he lowers the pen—“she may dance again.”

I look down at the films for a long time.

“You’re certain of this?”

He nods.

There are four pieces of plastic on my window with a woman’s leg on them, and I have to read the label in the corner twice before the letters hold still. I put both hands behind my back and leave them there.

“Don’t tell her yet.”

Salar’s eyebrow goes up. “Why?”

“I’ll tell her myself.”

He watches me for a second longer, then starts peeling the films down and sliding them into a folder. I let him get most of it done.