Page 44 of The Second Death of Locke
Boots sounded on the stairs, then in the hall. Then, a quiet inhale in the doorway. “Eron, can you help me with the bodies?”
Kier’s voice, calm and sure, always so much better with emergencies than she was. Grey finished her work on Brit’s forehead and cut away their jacket, revealing the slice to their arm. It was not deep enough for stitches, merely a graze.
A hand landed on her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
She did not look at him. If she looked at him, it would all be over. “Yes,” she said. “The keys are on the nightstand by Sela. I don’t know if the innkeeper is dead or just unconscious.”
“I’ll handle it.”
He brushed the hair away from her forehead. She swabbed gently at the blood crusting around Brit’s wound. Ola had shifted closer to their head, humming softly as she fed a constant thread of power into them.
Grey finished at around the same time Kier and Eron removed the last of the bodies, and Eron took Sela into the other room. She looked up to find Ola’s eyes, hard as flint.
“Why didn’t you give them power?” Ola asked, clearly seething.
Before Grey could answer, Kier said, “Now’s not the time. Can I trust you to keep watch in here for a moment?”
Ola looked up at him, silhouetted in the doorway. Her mouth thinned into a line. “Yes, Captain,” she said very quietly.
“Good. Hand, bring your supplies.”
Grey packed the kit with shaking fingers. Kier had already disappeared down the hall, but the door was open to a new room—the six of them were the only ones there, so she figured he’d commandeered an empty room. She walked in to find him sitting on a chair he’d dragged to the bed.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, his eyes catching on her blood-soaked sleeve.
“Not mortally wounded, no.”
“Take off your coat,” he said, all authority. “And shirt. Please.”
Grey didn’t know what to do—what to say. The tether between them was unbroken, but he didn’t pull from her, nor did he send anything through. It just sat heavy on her chest, her power unspent.
So she did as he asked. She shrugged off her coat, biting back a sob at the pain in her arm, and unbuttoned and discarded her shirt with one hand. He did not look at her face when she sat in front of him in her vest.
“I… You know more than me,” Kier said. “What do you need? Stitches?”
Grey forced herself to look, breathing in through her mouth and out through her nose. “It’s deep,” she said. “There’s gauze in there—yes, take that, and the soap there.” Her voice felt very far away as Kier shuffled through the kit, picking up the items she indicated. “Clean your hands, then me. It will hurt.”
“Okay,” he said. He disappeared for the barest moment to retrieve a pitcher and basin. She focused on her breathing, watching him as he washed his hands before turning his attention to cleaning her skin. When he rubbed at the wound, she gritted her teeth against any noise that threatened to escape—the world went white in a frizzle of electric pain around her. When she came back to herself, her fingers were gripping Kier’s thigh so very tightly. Her mouth tasted of blood—her teeth had pierced her lip.
Despite her reactions, Kier hadn’t stopped. His face was close to her wound; it was still leaking blood. He wiped it away in a pink smear of salve and blood.
“Let me see,” she said.
“I don’t think,” Kier said very carefully, “a kiss will heal it.”
Her laugh was cloudy with the lump firmly lodged in her throat. She took in the wound: when it was cleaned, it didn’t look so deep. “I think it’s okay if you just wrap it very tightly,” she said.
He looked at her, finally, and she saw the raw guilt on his face. He hadn’t been angry at her at all. “If that wound was on me, would you be satisfied with wrapping it?”
She chewed on the inside of her lip. “No.”
Kier nodded. He found a fresh needle, thread. He’d patched her up many times, bandaging wounds she couldn’t reach herself, rubbing antiseptic salves and ointments into her skin, getting her stable if anything major happened during a battle, which it almost never did. But for anything more serious, she’d always gone to the infirmary—it had nothing to do with Kier’s experience or lack thereof; even though he’d watched her do stitches so many times, he probably knew how to as well as she did.
“Anesthetic, please. That greenish-gray salve, in the pot with the blue lid,” Grey said, looking at the wall. He rubbed the salve over the edges of her wound, the catch of his rough fingers making her hiss.
“Sorry,” he murmured. She didn’t look as he prepared, but shefeltit when he started stitching.
It wasn’t his fault—actually, it absolutelywashis fault that it hurt as much as it did. She sucked a breath through her teeth, her nails digging into his thigh, feeling every single puncture of the needle, every tug of the thread.
