I didn't ask for two

Episode 11

POV: Kim

He was already moving when I got to the bottom of the stairs.

Moving was a generous word. He was navigating — the particular, deliberate negotiation of a body that has decided it's going to do a thing and is now in ongoing discussion with physics about the terms. One hand on the wall. Not leaning on it. Just: aware of where it was.

The smell hit me at the third step from the bottom.

Blood, first. Hot and metallic and immediate, the kind of smell that bypasses analysis and goes straight to the base of the spine. And underneath it — around it, threaded through it like a second signal — that wild, ozone musk that I had catalogued and filed and never successfully explained. The two things together were wrong in a way I felt in my sternum before I understood why.

Something is hurt, said Voice of Reason. She said it the way she said facts. Something large is hurt.

Frank didn't look at me.

"I'm fine," he said.

***

He said it the way he said everything — full sentence, no hedge, as if the words were a decision rather than a report. He said it while favouring his left side in a way that was visible from six feet away. He said it while the front of his shirt, what remained of it, was doing a colour I was going to think about later.

He took one step. His jaw tightened. He took another.

"You're not fine," I said.

He kept walking.

"Frank."

He stopped. Not because I'd said his name. He stopped the way he occasionally stopped — as if he'd run a calculation and arrived at a result he found mildly inconvenient.

I came down the last two steps. I held up the kit.

He looked at it. Then at me. Then at the corridor ahead of him, which led to wherever he'd been going, which was presumably somewhere to be fine in private.

"You need help," I said. "Right now."

WE ARE GIVING ORDERS TO THE MAN WHO RUNS THIS PLACE, said Panic. THIS IS UNPRECEDENTED. THIS HAS A LEGAL—

Shut up, said Adventurer. We have a kit.

Silence.

"My room," Frank said.

"Your room," I agreed.

He turned. I followed.

I did not think about the fact that he let me.

***

The room was larger than mine. Sparse in the way that suggested preference rather than absence — a bed, a dark dresser, a window facing the rear of the building. Low light. It smelled like him: that layered thing I'd never been able to name, darker now with blood and exertion underneath it.

"Sit," I said.

He sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress absorbed his weight without drama. Everything about him was without drama right now, which was its own kind of alarming — Frank compressed to the minimum required, spending everything on the basic task of holding position.

I set the kit on the dresser and opened it. Organized, well-stocked. The kind of inventory assembled by someone with specific expectations about what they'd need and how often.

I filed that for later.

"Shirt," I said.

A pause — shorter than I expected. He reached up with his right arm, not his left, and pulled what remained of it over his head.

I turned around.

***

I have seen injuries.

I am twenty-one and I have had a life and I have seen injuries. I know what a bad cut looks like. I know what a bad cut looks like when it hasn't been treated, when it's been left for hours, when the body has been doing what bodies do under insufficient conditions.

These were not that.

Three tears across his left side, from just below the shoulder blade down across his ribs. Deep. Ragged at the edges in a way that spoke to force rather than precision — the specific texture of something that had pulled rather than sliced.

But the edges.

The edges were scorched. Not burned, not cauterized. Scorched — as if whatever had opened these wounds had also, simultaneously, attempted to close them. The bleeding had slowed to almost nothing. The colour at the margins was wrong, too dark, the skin around the tears in the early stages of something that should have taken days to begin.

Three hours. These should not look like this after three hours.

Column four, said Voice of Reason, very quietly. Implausible Wounds.

I picked up the antiseptic.

"This is going to sting," I said.

"I know," he said.

I leaned in.

***

I had the gauze in my hand when he moved.

Not away. He didn't flinch, didn't shift. His right hand came up — fast, controlled, the unhurried speed of something that doesn't need to hurry — and closed around my wrist.

Iron. Not painful. Absolute. His fingers wrapped completely around my wrist, his thumb and middle finger nearly touching on the other side, engulfing it entirely.

And hot.

Not warm-person hot. Not fever hot. The specific, unnatural heat of him concentrated in his palm, in his fingers, radiating against the inside of my wrist where the skin was thin and the pulse was close to the surface — and the heat of his skin was doing something terrifying to my own heartbeat, dragging it down into his own heavy, predatory rhythm.

I went still.

His grip didn't tighten. It didn't need to.

"Don't look," he said.

His voice was rough at the edges in a way it never was. Something scraped out of it, something that cost him the words.

I looked.

His eyes were wrong.

Less than a second — half that. The dark irises lit from somewhere behind them, a sudden deep amber that had no business existing in the low light of a normal room, that was not reflection, not tiredness, not anything I had a category for.

Gold. Like a predator catching the light.

Then dark again. Completely dark. As if I had imagined it.

WHAT COLOR WAS THAT, Panic shrieked, her voice cracking. THAT WAS NOT A HUMAN COLOR.

Tapetum lucidum, Voice of Reason whispered, sounding genuinely terrified. Reflective layer in the eyes of... no. No, that's not possible.

His thumb was against my pulse point.

I wasn't sure he knew that.

"Frank—"

"Go," he said. Still rough. Still that scraped-out register. "Please."

***

I stood there for one more second.

His hand was still around my wrist. His eyes were dark. The scorched edges of the wounds I wasn't supposed to be looking at were right there, and the antiseptic was in my other hand, and his thumb was on my pulse, and he had said please in a voice that suggested the word cost him something he didn't have much left of tonight.

I set the antiseptic on the dresser.

I did not go.

Kim, said Voice of Reason. Very quietly. What are we doing.

I don't know yet, I said.

But as I stepped back into his space, reaching for the gauze, I knew one thing with absolute certainty: if he told me to leave again, I was going to make him say it.

And I didn't think he had the strength to say it twice.