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I should have kept the no going, but the burn pulled when I breathed and the day had been long and the fight wasn’t one I had the energy for, so I did the stupid thing and slipped out of my robe then untucked my shirt. I watched his face while I did it, because if I was going to hand him the wound I was at least going to get something for it. I’d braced for the flat clinical nothing, the line-item face he’d turned on me in the gallery, the one that took inventory and felt none of it.

That wasn’t what I got.

Something went through him fast, there and gone before I could name it, a flinch that pinched his brows but never made it any further. Then his eyes went to the linen and stopped there. He knew a dressing like that would be hard for me to do myself so someone else already knew about my injury.

I lifted the edge of the bandage for him, because he hadn’t asked and wasn’t going to. Then he leaned in across the table and very purposefully didn’t touch it. He moved closer, near enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him, and he didn’t reach for me, didn’t offer to help, which for some reason I appreciated.

For a second I couldn’t make myself breathe right, and it wasn’t the cold burn. It was the bare hands and the held breath and the fact that the one man in this building whose whole inheritance was, theoretically, the unmaking of pain had it in reach, free for the taking, and had decided not to take it. I’d spent my life around people who reached for the easy thing. I wasn’t sure how to respond when someone didn’t.

“That’s a cold burn,” he said. “White at the edge, no blistering, and there are three people in your year who make cold like that. Two of them have no reason to.” He didn’t look up from it. “Honora Smithe.” Not a question.

“A scrimmage is nobody’s fault.” I kept my chin up. “You can read that in a file somewhere.”

“Which scrimmage?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to the form. It matters to me, which is a separate problem, and not one the form has a line for.” His voice didn’t change, but him saying that meant something, and that made my chest tight for a different reason than the burn. “The scrimmage number is something that they ask on the form.” He looked at the burn and not at me. “There’s a form for most of what happens to you here.” The last was said almost to himself more than anything else.

“Then can we agree it’s nothing?”

“We’re not agreed on anything.” He still hadn’t written a word.

He got up instead and came around the table slowly, telegraphing every step of it like a man approaching a spooked animal, with his hands visible the whole way. He crouched at my side and looked at the burn and the set of my spine and the brace I’d built across my shoulders to keep the left side from moving. Then he started, very gently, to take it apart. It was the same correction as the first session weeks ago, the one where he’d taken my wrist and dropped it like I’d scalded him, except nothing dropped now. His bare hand came to my shoulder and eased it down off the brace, and the other hovered at the line of my back, not quite landing, guiding without gripping. The heat came off him the way it came off Kit, except there was no fire under it. Just a man being unbearably careful.

“Breathe out,” he said.

I breathed out.

“You’re holding the whole left side rigid to protect it. That’s why it’s setting wrong. You have to let it move or it’ll knit short.”

“And you’d know that how?”

“I write down injuries for a living. Not just mental ones either.”

He didn’t touch the burn. He touched everywhere around it, above the rib and below it, the flat of his palm at my shoulder blade, the tips of his fingers at the curve of my spine and the side of my neck where the tendon ran tight as wire. Every place he could have touched and didn’t sat in the air between us like a held note that wouldn’t resolve. His breath had gone shallow as mine, and I counted it without meaning to, his and mine, the two of them not quite matched, both of us breathing like the room was running out of air.

“Lower your shoulder,” he said, his voice now holding a distinct raspy quality.

I lowered it.

“There.” His hand moved a quarter inch and stopped. “Hold it there. Not braced. Just there.”

“It hurts there.”

“It’ll hurt less than if it heals crooked.”

And then his hand stopped above my skin and shook, the smallest tremor, half a second of it, something surfacing that he was holding down by force, briefly breaking through and getting shoved back. He fixed the set of a shoulder that didn’t need fixing anymore, and his thumb came to rest just under the edge of my shirt, a clean inch from the burn, and stayed. The heat of his touch seared into me in a way that both made me want to melt into him and pull away at the same time.

“Why do you let them put you in the line of fire?” he said, near my ear. “Vivienne. The scrimmages. You read every room you walk into. You see it coming, I know you do. Why do you stand there and let it land?”

My pulse was doing something I didn’t authorize. I didn’t know how to respond to his question so I dodged it. “Why do you file reports on me?”

His hand landed and went still against my ribs. For a moment I waited for my power to come up, to respond to him as it always had done when we’d touched before, but this time it was quiet, hiding somewhere in my chest as though it didn’t want to spook him, the same way he seemed to not want to spook me.

I turned my head just enough to catch the edge of him, the jaw gone tight, the eyes down. “You’ve seen me since week one. You write down everything about me, and you hand it off to someone else, and you let it land. Every time. Three times a week. So don’t ask me why I stand in the fire, Cormac. Ask yourself first.”

“It isn’t the same thing.”