Page 10 of Thexan

“I place myself at risk every time someone drags a half-dead stranger to my door.”

“I am not a stranger to your kind.”

“No,” I said, glancing over the scaled structure of his chest and the ridged planes of his face. “You definitely are not.”

His mouth tightened again, and this time I was almost certain it would have been a grim smile on anyone else.

I stepped away only long enough to retrieve a clean blanket from the storage cabinet. The moment distance opened between us, I heard his breathing change. He controlled it quickly, but not quickly enough. I turned back and found him staring at the ceiling, every line of his body held in rigid restraint.

“You feel that when I move away.”

“Yes.”

The honesty surprised me.

I returned to the cot and spread the blanket carefully over him, avoiding the wound. “Does it hurt?”

“Not physically.”

That answer stayed with me.

I should have asked more. I should have demanded a full explanation, one that included every risk he had not yet named. Instead, I found myself studying the controlled tension in his face and the way his fingers had curled against the blanket, not reaching for me, not asking, but fighting the need to do both.

For reasons I did not want to examine too closely, that mattered.

I sat in the chair beside the cot and rested my hand lightly against his forearm.

His eyes closed.

The effect was quiet this time, but no less real. The tension eased from him gradually, not disappearing but settling into something his body could bear. I watched the change with the same clinical attention I had given the wound, though there was nothing clinical about the way my own pulse responded.

“This is temporary,” I said, though I wasn’t sure whether I meant the treatment, his presence in my infirmary, or the strange connection tightening between us.

His eyes opened again.

“No,” he said softly. “It is not.”

I held his gaze, and for the first time since I had found him at the ridge, I let myself consider the possibility that the danger he represented was not the only reason I couldn’t make myself step away.

Then someone knocked hard on the infirmary door.

I stood too quickly, and his hand caught mine before I had taken a full step. This time, there was no unconsciousness to excuse it. His fingers closed around mine with controlled urgency, and his voice dropped lower than before.

“Do not open it until you know who stands outside.”

I looked toward the door, then back at him.

The knock came again.

“Brynn?” Tanner called from the other side. “You in there? We found blood on the lower ridge.”

Thexan’s grip tightened around my hand.

Not painfully.

Protectively.

And every instinct I had told me that whatever had followed him into my mountains had already begun to arrive.