I didn't ask for two

Episode 12

POV: Kim

He didn't tell me to leave again.

That was the thing. He watched me step back into his space, pick up the gauze, set the antiseptic where I could reach it — watched all of this with the particular quality of attention he gave everything, complete and unhurried — and he didn't say a word.

I chose to interpret that as permission.

My hands were not entirely steady. I noted this the way you note a structural problem in a building you're already inside: important information, not currently actionable.

I worked.

***

His skin was hot.

I knew he was hot. I had catalogued it, filed it, developed a whole organisational system for the evidence that these men ran at temperatures that didn't correspond to standard human biology. But knowing it and having my palms flat against his ribcage while I cleaned the wound were different categories of information.

This was the second category.

The heat came off him in waves — not fever heat, not the clammy, desperate warmth of a body fighting infection. Steady. Radiating. The kind of heat that suggested this was simply how he was, that his body ran this temperature the way an engine runs at operating temperature, because this was what it was built for.

My hands absorbed it through the gloves I'd found in the kit.

Through the gloves.

HE IS HOTTER THAN A HUMAN, Panic announced. THIS IS A FEVER. THIS IS SEPSIS. THIS IS—

His pulse is forty beats per minute, Voice of Reason said.

Silence.

I counted, she continued, in the tone of someone reporting findings they wish they hadn't found. While she's been working. Forty beats per minute. Resting. Post-injury. That is not a fever. That is not a human resting heart rate at all. That is something else entirely.

Nobody had an answer to that.

I kept working.

***

He didn't make a sound.

Not when I cleaned the edges of the wounds with the antiseptic — and I was not gentle, gentle wasn't the priority, clean was the priority, and the antiseptic was doing its job. Not when I pressed the gauze against the deepest section and held it there for the count of sixty. Not when I started taping.

He sat exactly where I'd put him and he was still in the way that cost something, the taut, contained stillness of a body holding position by decision rather than comfort.

But he watched me.

That was the thing I couldn't account for. He was watching me work with an attention I felt on the side of my face, on my hands, moving with me as I moved — not the surveillance I'd felt from the guards downstairs, not observation as threat assessment.

Something else. Something I didn't have a precise word for yet.

He's watching our hands, the Femme Fatale said.

She said it quietly. She'd been quiet the whole time — not absent, just waiting, the way she waited when she'd decided something was worth paying attention to.

He keeps looking at our hands, she said.

I know, I said.

He's letting us do this, she said. Not accusation. Fact, turned over carefully. A man like that. He's letting us.

I pressed the last strip of tape into place.

My hands flattened briefly against his side — not intentional, just the end of the motion, both palms against the gauze and his skin underneath it and his heat underneath that — and I felt the breath he didn't quite take.

Not pain. The opposite.

I filed that for later.

The later pile had become a later archive. The later archive had become a later library.

***

We're useful, said the Femme Fatale.

She said it the way she said things when she was deciding whether to believe them.

He needed something and we had it. He let us near him and we didn't— we were steady. Our hands were steady enough.

They weren't, I said.

Steady enough, she repeated.

I didn't argue.

Resting my gloved hands against his ribcage, close enough to feel every slow, even breath — this was not a place I'd expected to feel competent. It was not a sensation I had a category for. The Femme Fatale didn't say anything else. She didn't need to. She sat with it the way she sat with things that mattered, quiet and present and not going anywhere.

***

I leaned back to check the tape.

It was holding. The bleeding had stopped — had been stopping for a while, in the way that still didn't correspond to what I understood about wounds and time. The edges of the gauze were clean. Everything that could be done with the contents of a first aid kit had been done.

I started pulling off the gloves.

His hand closed around my wrist.

Not the quick, controlled movement from before. Slower this time. Deliberate in a different way — not stopping me, not restraining. His fingers wrapped around my wrist and his thumb found the inside of it, found the pulse point, and pressed there. Lightly. Like he was taking a reading.

Like my heartbeat was information he needed.

I went still.

He was looking at his thumb. At the place where it sat against my skin. His expression had the quality of a man doing something he'd decided to do before I'd finished the last piece of tape, and I had missed the moment of that decision, and I didn't know what it meant.

He pulled. Slow. Steady.

I am not a small woman, but his arm moved with the effortless, terrifying certainty of a man who could move mountains if he decided they were in the way.

I stepped closer. My legs made that decision without consulting anyone.

He looked up.

I didn't know what to say. My body did.

"You shouldn't be this close," he said.

His voice had that rough quality still — scraped-out, lower than usual, the register that had said please and cost him something. He said you shouldn't be this close in that same register and his other hand came up, unhurried, and his fingers found the back of my neck.

Not gripping. Finding.

The heel of his palm at my nape, his fingers spreading into my hair at the base of my skull. With the movement, his scent enveloped me completely — no longer just blood and ozone, but the deep, wild, intoxicating musk of him, hot and earthy and entirely possessive. The heat of his hand there was immediate, enormous, and my entire nervous system went very quiet in a way it had never gone quiet before.

Not the alarm silence from the end of episode nine, not the startled silence of four voices going still at once. Something different. Something warmer.

"Little girl," he said.

He said it the way he said things that weren't questions. Not a diminutive. A fact. His thumb still on my pulse, his hand in my hair, his body between me and the rest of the room.

He didn't say go.

His fingers curled at the base of my skull.

Frank—, I started.

I didn't finish.

I didn't finish because he had pulled, very slightly, and my head had tilted back on its own, and he was looking at me the way he'd looked at the envelope on that first night — like he'd already decided how this problem was solved.

The lamp threw amber light across everything.

Outside, the building was silent.

His pulse under my hand, where I'd braced myself against his chest without noticing — forty beats per minute, slow and deep and absolutely certain — and mine against his thumb, considerably less certain, considerably less slow.

Okay, said the Femme Fatale, very softly.

Okay.