Page 7 of Tater
That wasn’t accident. That was message.
Tater looked down at her again. She was still breathing, shallow but steady. The fire had retreated, hiding inside her chest like it was waiting for permission to come back out.
He slid the chain into his pocket, thumb rubbing over the metal links.
“Never again,” he said quietly.
No one heard him over the rain, but the dragon must have. Because for a heartbeat the heat under her skin answered, faint and furious.
.
CHAPTER 4
Fallout
Pain didn’t come back all at once.
It seeped in slow, like water through cracks, until she realized the cracks were her.
First was the ache — a deep, heavy throb in her ribs, like someone had replaced them with concrete and then taken a bat to it. Then the sharper edges: a hot, stabbing line down her side, a dull pulse in her shoulder, her leg humming like it had its own bad heartbeat.
Then sound.
Not rain. Not engines. A buzzing fluorescent light overhead, the low murmur of voices through a wall. Somewhere, a TV played with the volume too low to understand, just that constant tiny murmur of people arguing about nothing.
Under all of it, there was another sound.
A slow, steady rumble, not outside her body but under her skin.
“You’re late,”the dragon said.
She breathed in. Air scraped her throat like gravel. The smell hit her next — rubbing alcohol that never quite covered upold cigarette smoke, stale whiskey sunk into wood, that faint undercurrent of leather and oil.
The med room.
Not dead, then.
“Damn it,” she croaked.
Ren’s voice sounded wrecked. Dry. Like nobody had thought to give her water or she’d refused it. Both seemed likely.
She blinked against the bright light. The ceiling was the same stained off-white it’d always been, with a brown water mark spreading in one corner like a map no one would follow. Someone had taped a faded poster of a rock band next to the vent. One of the corners drooped.
Ren’s body felt heavy. Constricted.
She turned her head slightly. It hurt. Everything hurt. But she could see the bandages wrapped tight around her chest, the edge of gauze taped to her side. Her right leg was wrapped from mid-thigh to calf. Her left arm had an IV line in it, taped down with shaky care.
Under the bandages, faint threads of gold glowed beneath her skin — little veins of dragon light weaving through the damage.
“You burned hot,”the dragon said, tone somewhere between impressed and scolding.
“Yeah,” she rasped. “That happens when assholes shoot me.”
She tried to shift her left hand. It answered, sluggish but there. She flexed her fingers. It hurt, but the good kind of hurt— the kind that meant nerves still worked.
Voices filtered in from the other side of the door.
“…I’m telling you, he hasn’t slept,” a rough voice muttered. Mouse. “He’s just sitting in there watching her breathe.”
