He fell back on the bed with a wet cough and a shuddering exhale.
I heard the regret in his voice—in the effort it took him to speak to me—as well as the hard authority in his voice when he commanded everyone to leave me be. This stranger who looked just like Fell was sorry for my pain even as he battled his own.
He was sorry for losing the brother he had only just found.
It was all so horribly,horriblywrong.
Still desperate and unwilling to believe, I moved in closer, holding out my hand, showing him the marked X as though he needed to see it up close. Words tripped from my lips, assertions that if I could stillfeelFell, he must be alive.
He gazed up at me with four fresh slashes on his face, courtesy of a dragon’s talons. Purple blood dotted the edges of torn flesh, already sewn tautly together by a hand skilled with needle and thread. A little higher on his face and he would have lost an eye, and I doubted even a dragon could recover from that.
One very nasty abrasion on his shoulder was impossible to close with stitching. The wound was so wide and deep that I glimpsed bone through the pulpy mess of raw tissue.
My stomach turned at the sight, but I stubbornly remained in place, bringing my hand closer, thrusting my palm out as though he only needed to better see the mark of where Fell and I were blooded to fully understand.
He hardly spared a glance for my hand, warily eyeing the herbal concoction Brenna prepared before looking back at me. “The bond,” he muttered as though that were explanation enough, “is strong.”
“It can live on when the body is gone,” Brenna added distractedly as she lifted a handful of the green mixture toward Vetr’s face.
I looked wildly between them. It was like they were speaking another language.
Brenna applied the green goo to his face, and he hissed, his big body arching up off the bed as she applied a liberal amount of the remedy to his skin. His eyes went feral, the silvery gray shuddering as the pupils thinned to slits.
She tsked. “We’ve got to get these gashes to heal properly. Don’t want any scars on that handsome face of yours, do you?”
He yanked away from her ministrations and made a sound that seemed part growl. “I could give a fuck how I look, Bren.”
“No? Well, I do. I’d rather not look at your scarred-up face and know I could have fixed it, so stop resisting.”
My gaze trailed over his ravaged body, and I felt slightly queasy, thinking of Fell and how he must have suffered, thinking what those other dragons must have done to him if this was what they’d done to Vetr.
“Hey,” came the gruff voice.
My eyes snapped to his face. His eyes had calmed, the pupils rounding back to something more human as he studied me. “He didn’t suffer.”
He said it almost kindly and with such earnestness, clearly willing me to accept this as truth.
I inhaled raggedly, not certain that I believed him. If Fellhad, in fact, suffered, would he tell me the truth? Would he want me to know the ugly reality?
I rubbed my fingertips against the popping and pulsing flesh of my palm like it was Fell I touched and comforted.
It was an action Vetr did not miss. “Even in death,” he went on, “the echo of a lost mate can … linger.” He spoke haltingly through grimaces and hissed breaths as Brenna moved on to the cuts and abrasions scattering his broad chest, wiping them clean with a damp cloth, then wringing the linen out in a bowl until the water ran purple with blood.
Mate.
Fell had been my mate?
That traveled around in my thoughts, settling and sinking deep. It was a faltering, startling realization. A fact that had never been a fact to me until that moment.
It had never occurred to me when we were together. There were so very many things that had not occurred to me then.
Fell, my mate.
That felt so much bigger, so much more significant than being husband and wife.
Our union had always felt a bit of a farce—an arranged marriage forced on us both. Born of deception and lies.
But mates?
