Page 128 of Elven Crown

The healer looked sharply up at him with an exaggerated scowl, even coming from Zida. Then she dipped her head closerto inspect the wound and the foreign body still inside it. “Hmm… Oh, yeah. Well, there’s definitely a lot of blood loss here, I can tell you that.”

If Rebecca had had the energy, she would have rolled her eyes.

Maxwell, however, stopped growling and glowering—looking a little paler than usual, Rebecca noted—and murmured, “I brought her here as quickly as I could.”

“I’m sure you did.” Zida cocked her head as she studied his face. “Let’s just hope it was quickly enough, huh? By the looks of her… Well, it could still go either way.”

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Zida took off across the infirmary again, filling it with the sound of drawers and cabinet doors rumbling open and banging shut, plus the clink of various glass vials and the clang of metal instruments smashing around, as if the old woman still hadn’t figured out how to properly organize her supplies.

As steadfast as ever, Maxwell hovered beside the bed, looking Rebecca over with such deep concern behind his eyes—concern bordering on crippling pain—that she wondered if the explosion had also wounded him and she’d just been too preoccupied to notice.

“You’ll be all right,” he told her, his voice thick with emotion she didn’t recognize and didn’t expect. Not from him. “You’ll see. We got you here in time.”

“I know,” she croaked. It felt like a ridiculous thing to say, but it was the truth.

Rebecca knew she’d be fine. She just wished they could get all the fiddling and fussing over with so she finallycouldbe.

Maxwell didn’t look very convinced, though. In fact, as he stood rigidly beside the bed, his eyebrows drew farther together and darkened with unseen pain while he looked her over again from head to toe.

Almost as if he couldn’t bear to see her like this.

She was certain the injury looked far worse than it was, with three inches of a thick wooden stake protruding from her belly and blood all over her.

Blood all over him. Blood everywhere, really.

What a mess Rowan had made of the entire morning.

And to think, Rebecca had started today feeling so good about everything until the elf had fired that Hells-cursed machine gun.

“What are you doing? Just standing there like a useless lump?” Zida snapped as she returned to the bedside, shooing Maxwell absently with a wave of her hand. “Move. Get out of the way.”

He tried to reach for Rebecca—for which part of her, she wasn’t sure—but the healer slapped his hands away until he finally relented and took two hesitant steps back.

“This is the only issue we’re dealing with today?” Zida asked as she stooped over Rebecca’s belly and narrowed her beady eyes at the wound.

“The only one I know of,” Rebecca choked out. “Yeah.”

A tremendously powerful surge of debilitating fatigue swept over her then, drowning out all other sensation as her eyelids fluttered.

Seriously? The woman was taking so long to fix her up, she was actually losing consciousness.

“Oh no, you don’t. Hey!” Zida snapped her fingers several times in Rebecca’s ear until Rebecca’s eyes finally opened again. “No, you stay with me and stayawake. Understand? I willruinyou if you do anything else.”

Zida’s wrinkled old face disappeared from view, replaced almost instantly by Maxwell’s.

“Just hang in there,” he muttered.

When Rebecca felt a warm weight settling around her hand, she tried to pull out of it but didn’t have the strength. Even the tingling jolt of energy zipping through her hand and up into her arm at the contact felt weak and somehow far away.

Was he holding her hand?

More than anything else, that possibility baffled her entirely.

Since when did her Head of Security grow so concerned over anyone’s injury that he stayed at their bedside in the infirmary and held their hand?

Her eyelids fluttered again until she somehow forced them to stop so she could focus on his face.

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