Chapter 504

IVORY

The secondary clinic was smaller than the main one.

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This was intentional. I’d designed it that way during the second curse year, when I’d started thinking seriously about the possibility of needing a treatment space that was both functional and separated from the main clinic’s traffic – for quarantine situations, for sensitive cases, for the specific category of patient whose presence in the main clinic would create complications of a social or security nature that would interfere with treatment quality.

I had not, at the time, imagined that I would be using it to treat the man who’d slammed me against a wall with cracks in it while simultaneously being unable to feel the fated mate bond between us because Shadowmere’s broken pack infrastructure had severed my connection to my wolf half, who presumably would have been having opinions about the situation if she could have gotten through.

I was having opinions for both of us.

The treatment began with the standard intake procedure, which I conducted with the professional focus of someone who had decided that professionalism was the structure inside which the next thirty minutes was going to live, regardless of the specific quality of what those thirty minutes contained. I assessed the injury. I gathered the required compounds. I prepared the workspace with the systematic efficiency that had been my primary coping mechanism since approximately the second year of the curse.

Killian sat on the secondary treatment table and watched me work with the expression of someone who was in significant pain and was trying not to show how much.

He was not succeeding at this.

The injury was real. That was the thing I’d known from the gate and was now confirming with the specific thoroughness I brought to all clinical work – the network’s compound, weaponized on a blade, delivered with accuracy that suggested whoever had gotten close to him had been trained. The tissue damage was at a level that explained the favoring I’d noticed and that was going to require the full treatment protocol rather than the expedient version.

It was also, I noted clinically, his right side. Not his dominant hand, but close enough to it that the injury had been specifically chosen rather than incidentally delivered.

“This is going to hurt significantly,” I said, preparing the first compound.

“You said that,” Killian said.

“I’m reminding you,” I said. “Because knowing it’s coming and being prepared for it are different categories, and I find that patients who’ve been reminded tend to manage the first application better.”

“You’re being clinical,” he said.

“I’m treating an injury.” I said. “This is what treating injuries looks like.”

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“You’re furious,” he said.

I looked up from the preparation.

“I’m working,” I said.

“You’re furious and you’re working,” he said. “Which I understand is how you do most things.”

“Killian,” I said.

“I know I’m not your favorite person,” he said.

“That is,” I said, returning to the compound preparation with the specific care of someone doing a task that required attention and was grateful for the requirement, “the most significant understatement you have ever produced. And given your history, that is a meaningful distinction.”

He was quiet for a moment. The quiet of someone who’d said the first thing they’d been holding and was working out whether the second thing was worth saying yet.

I finished the preparation and turned to begin the application.

He flinched.

Not at the application – I hadn’t touched him yet.

“Fair enough,” I said, and applied it.

He made a sound. I gave him credit for keeping it as small as he did.

The secondary clinic was quiet around us. Three guards outside the door – Nina’s arrangement – and the secondary corridor beyond them, and the distant ambient sounds of the pack going about its Saturday in the aware-of-something-significant-but-not-in-crisis way of a place that had learned to distinguish between types of notable events.

“What the hell are you doing here,” I said.

The words came out even despite the preceding twenty minutes of me deciding I was going to be professional and clinical and was not going to have the version of this conversation that was being generated by the part of me that was not interested in professionalism and had been generating it since the gate.

“I had nowhere else to go,” Killian said.

“You had,” I said, applying the second compound with the controlled precision of someone doing clinical work, “approximately seventeen neutral territories within two days’ travel. Three allied packs that would have accepted a request for temporary shelter. The eastern trading posts, which operate specifically as refuge infrastructure for-”

“I had nowhere safe,” Killian said.

“The eastern-”

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“The network has contacts in the eastern trades,” he said. “Two of the neutral territories are compromised One of the allied packs has been flagged in the intelligence files for years as having connections to-”

“How do you know what’s in the intelligence files,” I said.

He looked at me with the expression of someone who’d spent fifteen years outside a pack and had been paying attention to it from the outside.

“You’ve been monitoring us,” I said.

“I’ve been keeping track,” he said.

“That’s the same thing,” I said.

“It’s not,” he said. “Monitoring implies interference. I haven’t interfered.”

“Except for the network,” I said.

“Which I stopped interfering with,” he said.

“By helping me escape,” I said. “Yes. Which then got you hunted by the people you’d been cooperating with.” I moved to the third compound. “Which you knew would happen when you helped me.”

“Yes,” he said.

“And you helped anyway,” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

I applied the third compound. He made the sound again, larger this time because the third compound was significantly more aggressive than the first two and I’d warned him about this and he’d nodded and the nod had been optimistic.

“I feel you are angry with me,” he said, when the immediate pain had settled into the sustained ache of the compound doing its work.

I stopped.

I set down the applicator.

I looked at him.

“YOU THINK?” I said, and the professionalism structure made a specific sound as several of its load- bearing elements gave way simultaneously. “What the actual hell is wrong with you? Do you have any idea -“I stopped. Breathed. “You were THIS close to being a significant structural problem for this pack’s gate. Do you have any idea how annoying it is to wipe blood off that freaking wall? The people who are going to be stuck on blood-washing duty—”