Had he even been aware that he was continuing his father's legacy of hatred because of some perverse need to please Mortdh's ghost?
It didn't really matter. She couldn't change him. Fates knew she'd tried. All she could do was adapt and mold herself into someone who was so dear to him that he was willing to make some concessions for her.
Those concessions had saved countless lives over the five thousand years they'd been together, and that had to be enough to justify her devotion to him, but the truth was that the only justification that mattered was her unconditional love for her mate.
"We need to re-break his ribs," Julian said. "They are fused at the wrong angle, and we need to remove the pressure from his heart."
The cracks that followed made her flinch. Someone touched her arm, startling her momentarily because she'd forgotten Esag was standing next to her. He was offering his silent support, and she was grateful for his presence. It would have been even more miserable standing alone in the narrow corridor outside of the medical bay while the doctor and his assistant pieced her mate back together like a broken doll.
"Blood pressure dropping," Aiden reported. He sounded alarmed.
"Push more fluids," Julian said. "His body needs resources to repair this much damage."
Resources. Such a clinical word for what was happening. Navuh's immortal body was trying desperately to heal itself,knitting bone and tissue back together, but even immortal healing had limits.
It was a miracle he was alive.
He'd jumped off a cliff after her. She still couldn't believe that he'd done that.
The sound of his roar when he had seen her fall, the image of him changing trajectory when he'd heard her scream, those would be forever seared into her memory.
His complete lack of hesitation before he launched himself after her. No calculation, no strategy, just pure instinct to save his mate.
"The leg needs realignment, too," Julian said. "Hold him steady."
Another crack. Another wave of nausea she pushed down. He was heavily sedated and felt nothing, which was a mercy, but those sounds were terrible nonetheless.
"How did we come to this?" she whispered, not really expecting an answer. "How did this happen? Did the Fates want this to happen?"
Esag shifted beside her. "The Fates work in mysterious ways. Sometimes it takes thousands of years for us to realize even one thread in their grand design. They use love and duty to pull us in the right directions."
She looked at him, really looked at him for the first time. She hadn't remembered him from the time the gods still walked among humans. She'd only known him by reputation and what Gulan had said about him. Other than the flaming red hair andthe handsome face, he didn't look like the young male Gulan had described. There was no playfulness left in him.
He looked broken.
Life would do that to a person, whether human or immortal, and it took incredible resilience and deliberation to keep positivity from crumbling to dust.
Areana had decided a long time ago that her life was about the small moments of joy. She collected them like someone collected precious stones, storing them in what she imagined as the positivity depository in her mind, from which she drew her strength.
"I did it to save Tula," she said quietly. "But it was still a betrayal, and yet he dove off a cliff to try to save me. The irony would be poetic if it weren't so tragic."
"The ribs are setting properly now," Julian's voice came through the door. "But the skull fracture concerns me. There's swelling."
Swelling meant brain damage. The possibilities stretched before her—Navuh waking up but not himself, or even worse, waking up exactly himself but worse. Or not waking up at all, trapped in an endless sleep while his body lived on.
"He's strong," Esag said. "Weaker immortals have recovered from worse."
Had they? She'd seen immortals survive terrible things, but the mind and the heart were fragile even in immortals. She thought of Navuh's father and the compulsion gift that came packaged together with madness and was passed down through the generations like a poisoned chalice. What if this injury made it worse?
"Pulse is stabilizing," Julian reported. "The healing is accelerating now that we've stopped the internal bleeding, and the bones are properly aligned."
Small mercies.
Areana pulled the blanket tighter, trying to stop the shaking. It wasn't cold that was making her tremble, it was the terrible knowledge that the mercy this doctor and his assistant were showing Navuh would never be reciprocated. He wouldn't feel gratitude. He wouldn't abandon his vendetta against Annani and her clan. He would keep hating them, and now he was at their mercy.
"That's all we can do for now." Julian sounded exhausted. "His body has to do the rest. We'll monitor the brain swelling, but..."
But. Such a small word to carry such enormous uncertainty.
