Page 54 of The Serpent's Bride
Raziel chuckled. His new bride had claws. He found that he enjoyed it a great deal. Far more than when she was playing timid. And now he wasfullyconvinced that the timid routine was entirely an act, which was fascinating to him.
Who was she?Really?
Every moment he spent around his new wife, he found something that felt like a new piece to a puzzle.
A puzzle that was forming an unexpected picture.
A picture that he was starting to find a little too enchanting for his comfort.
Bartholomew shook his head, picked up the forceps, and shifted his stool closer to begin the process of removing the bullet. He paused before pressing the steel ends into the wound on Monica’s side, just above her hip. Luckily, the bullet had not gone in terribly deep, nor had it hit any organs or arteries. She would be fine once the stitches healed.
The doctor turned his attention to Raziel. “You may wish to leave the room.”
“Why?” He arched his eyebrow back at the doctor. Monica’s wedding dress was already mostly cut away, leaving her in bloody shreds of what remained of the lacy gown and her undergarments. The maids had brought some sheets to drape over her for modesty. “It isn’t anything I haven’t already seen.”
“The blood, sir. You already seem…affected.” Bartholomew’s eyes flicked down to Raziel’s teeth.
Ah. Yes. Raziel’s fangs had extended without his noticing. He grimaced, forcing them to withdraw back into his jaw. “Continue.”
“Sir—”
It was Monica who settled the argument. “It’s fine. He can stay.”
He couldn’t help but feel a bit surprised at that. It looked like the doctor was equally shocked.
Briefly, she shut her eyes and laid her head down on the thin pillow that had been provided to her. She looked miserable, a thin layer of sweat on her forehead mixing with the dirt and blood that she’d gathered from the day’s misadventures. She blinked her eyes back open, likely remembering she wasn’t allowed to sleep with her concussion just yet. “He’ll control himself.”
What an oddly charming vote of confidence. Leaning against the wall, he watched her with a faint smile. “Listen to your new boss, doctor, and do your job. Get to work.”
“Excuse me?” The doctor did not seem so keen on that statement. “I still don’t think it’s best if you are here, with your current?—”
“She is my wife. You answer to her now, same as me. That is how marriage works, isn’t it?” Raziel huffed a laugh. “Or was I mistaken? Tell me, how would you prefer I structure this situation?”
“I—well—” The doctor didn’t seem to know what to say to that.
“If you don’t fucking pull this bullet out of my sideright now, I’m going to take those forceps and do it myself,” Monica snapped. “Stop. Wasting. Time.”
Bartholomew stared at her. Then looked to Raziel.
He merely gestured to the wound as if to ask the doctor what he was waiting for.
With a sigh, the doctor turned to the wound and put the tips of the forceps into the seeping wound.
Monica snarled low in her throat. Her hands were curled by her face. Both of them clenched tight into fists, but she otherwise didn’t move. She knew—either from experience or intuition—to keep still and try not to tense up as the doctor fished around in the wound as he searched for the spent lead inside of her.
Raziel would have to ask her about that later. If his new wife had taken a bullet before…he would have alotof questions.
Bartholomew stayed quiet as he worked. Monica squeezed her eyes shut, her face twitching in pain, the only sign that she was suffering at all from what was happening as the doctor did his job.
Raziel had seen many of his human soldiers reduced to tears from similar wounds. Ones who had purported themselves to betoughest of the tough.Monsters and killers of the worst sort, reduced to whimpering children when the needle met skin and wounds were stitched shut.
Yet, here was Monica.
His arranged wife from an irritating upstart family from some obscure city on the edge of Runne. One he had been looking forward to ridding himself of quickly. Who he had seen as nothing more than a nuisance at worst, or at best, a brief and amusing distraction.
But by the time the bullet clinked into the metal tray and Bartholomew picked up the thread to begin stitching the wound shut, Monica had made no sound through the entire ordeal past the occasional grunt. And as the doctor went to work closing the wound, Raziel wondered exactly what they did to their young women out in the outposts to give them such a level of pain tolerance.
Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that her eyes were open and she was blinking, he would assume she had fainted. Monica was studying objects on the far wall of the room with all the passive disinterest of someone sitting in the waiting room of a legal proceeding reading a plaque for the lack of anything better to do.
