Page 112 of Tarnished Queen

She’s so confident right now. So sure of herself.

Belle may not have been born into my world, but she knows how messy life can be. She understands better than most that people have to do whatever they can to survive their circumstances. As much as I hate Belle’s mother for what she did to her daughters, I offer her up a silent thanks of gratitude.

You made her like this. You didn’t mean to and you don’t deserve an ounce of fucking credit for it. But her strength is needed.

In the end, I decide “gratitude” is a little too strong of an emotion. “Acknowledgement” feels like plenty.

“What are you staring at?” Belle asks suddenly.

I blink and realize she’s looking up at me, a small smile playing on her lips. “Your hands,” I say honestly.

She looks down at where she’s smoothing a bandage around Christo’s forearm. “Do you have the hots for caretakers, Nikolai Zhukova?”

“Just one particular caretaker, Belle Zhukova.”

Her face flushes at the sound of her new name, and fuck, do I wish Christo hadn’t been waiting for us when we got back from the airport. She’d be tangled in my sheets right now.

I’m imagining the curves of her hips when Christo groans. It’s the first noise he’s made since I elbowed him in the truck.

I crouch down at his side. "You finally coming around?”

His eyes flutter and he coughs weakly. “Unless you two… are gonna keep… flirting,” he rasps. “I’d rather… die.”

I bark out a laugh. “Without us, you’d already be dead.”

“He wasn’t hurt quite that bad,” Belle comments. She stands up and backs away from Christo, visibly more nervous now that he’s conscious. “Mostly bruises and cuts. Maybe a fractured arm, I can’t tell.”

He squints against the light and tries to look down at himself. “My shirt is bloody.”

“Oh, and a broken nose,” she adds.

He lifts his hand to his face and taps the end of his nose gingerly, then winces. “Oh. Right. I remember that one. Hurt like a bitch.”

“You remember what happened?” I ask.

“In vivid, painful detail,” he grumbles. “I’ll probably be remembering it for a few days, at least.”

Belle hands him a couple pills and some water. “You should really be seen by a doctor. I’m barely proficient in applying bandages and Neosporin, so you’ll want to see a professional and make sure you don’t have any internal bleeding or anything.”

Christo takes the pills from her with a wary expression. “Thanks.”

"Yeah, of course."

The air in the room goes stale, the seconds stretching into a weird silence I have no intention of breaking. These two can get themselves out of their own awkward situations without my help.

Finally, Belle glances at me and then wipes her hands on her pants. “Well… I’ll let you two talk.”

I nod and wait until she’s out of earshot before I sit down on the coffee table facing Christo. “She nursed you back to health.”

“She wrapped me in bandages and gave me some aspirin. I could've done that for myself when I came to."

“I was going to drop your ass on the tile floor so you didn’t get blood on my furniture,” I tell him. “So you can at least be grateful you came to on the sofa instead in my foyer."

He repositions himself on his pillow and sighs. “I am. Shit, I am. Besides, Belle isn’t the one who broke my nose and put me in this position, so she isn’t top of my shit list by a mile.”

“She shouldn’t be on your shit list at all.”

He looks at me over the rim of his glass. “Time will tell.”

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