Page 15

It was deep. Long, and clean-edged, and deep enough that steri-strips would have been an insult to both of us. Whatever had done it had been sharp and it had been dragged in a clean straight line.

“Move your fingers for me.”

He moved them. All five, unhurried, like a man demonstrating a machine he was pretty proud of.

“And can you feel this? And this?” I touched the pad of his thumb, then his little finger, and got a nod for each. No tendon involvement, then. No numbness. That was good… well, for anyone that wasn’t his next intended victim, that was.

I cleaned around the edges with chlorhexidine, gentle as promised. And for a few blessed seconds he let me, and it was almost like tending anybody else.

“This needs stitching,” I said. “A lot of stitching. I’m going to numb it first.”

“No.”

I looked up. That was the first thing he had refused me.

“It’s nine or ten sutures through muscle you use every time you close your hand.” I heard my own voice come out flat and professional and entirely unlike me. “You will let me numb it.”

Something moved behind those eyes. Not anger. Something closer to delight.

“Then numb it,” he said, and just like that, he agreed. I filed this information away for another time, knowing that I would question why once the job was done.

I drew up the lidocaine, tapped the barrel, and told him what I always told them. A sting, then a burn, then nothing at all. Little pinch, simple as that. And as I slid the needle in along the wound edge and pushed…

Nothing.

Not a flinch. Not a twitch of the arm, not a change in his breathing, not so much as a tightening around his eyes. I had put that needle into grown men who wept like children. Into men who swore at me in three different languages. Yet he watched me do it the way you watch someone pour you a drink. Politely… And with interest.

I moved down the wound and did it again. And again. Four infiltrations along the length of it, and the only thing that changed in his entire body was that he tilted his head very slightly, to see my face better while I worked.

The last one sat awkwardly, right up at the inside of the elbow, where the skin was soft and kept sliding away from the needle every time the arm shifted. So, I flattened my free hand across his forearm to hold it still. And that was when he flinched.

It was nothing. A twitch, barely there and gone before I could be certain I had seen it at all. But it went through the whole length of him, and it came a full second after the needle did.

I was almost positive it hadn’t come from the needle, but it had come from my palm.

“Sorry. Did that hurt?” The question was out before I could stop it. Almost as though some part of me wanted to go digging in a place I knew I could slip into.

“You are asking the wrong question,” he replied, while those eyes stayed exactly where they were… locked on me.

“Now ask me what it does feel like.”

I swallowed hard and tried to ignore the tremor in my belly.

Thankfully, I was smart enough this time not to ask.

Instead, I moved my hand off him and finished the last of it, then capped the syringe and dropped it in the sharps container, before sitting back to give the lidocaine its three minutes. Which was, of course, exactly when his fingers moved. Just his fingers, where his hand rested near my hip, and they brushed the side of my leg through my scrubs. A slow stroke… There and gone in an instant.

But it could have been a wolf bite for the way I reacted, as I jumped a mile and the tray jumped with me. Swabs and forceps and a little steel dish went clattering to the floor. Oh, and I went down after them, face burning, fumbling and gathering my scattered instruments off the linoleum like the flustered idiot I had officially become.

“You… you…” I hissed up at him, scolding him like he was a child and not six and a half feet of convicted nightmare,

“…have been nothing but trouble. And I have been nothing but nice to you.” His eyes widened just a fraction before they warmed into something far too entertained.

“I know.” He said it easily, watching me scramble, and there was something almost sincere buried down under all that cold.

“Why do you think I want to touch you and not break you?”

My eyes flew to his, and I stood up too fast. My hands were shaking now, the tray rattling in them, and I hated that he could see it.