Lucas’s finger tapped on my side, and he sighed. “I think I’ll try to glue it. You’ll need to be careful with your movements.” He opened several packets of purple fluid and grabbed one of the sterile packages in front of my face. A pair of tweezers.
“This may burn.”
Starting at one end, he squeezed my skin back together and applied the purple fluid, holding it in place with the tweezers while it dried.
Sweat broke across my forehead as my nerves sparked, and I shoved the plate aside. When he squeezed a particularly tender area, I flinched, and his hands froze. He laid a hand over an unblemished portion of my back. “I’m sorry.”
“For what? Saving my life again?” Bitterness coated my voice. “Distract me. Where did you look for me?”
He went back to work. “When you didn’t show, I told myself you’d just changed your mind about us.”
My heart cracked a bit. “You believed that?”
He let out an angry snort. “No. I was lying to myself. You said you’d always come back to me. You promised, and I believed you.”
I closed my eyes, squeezing out tears.
“I searched everywhere, Sophia. I went through the prisoners waiting for Registration. I tried to find out if there’d been some sort of evacuation of Defiants. I scoured the brothels. I had Anna searching for you, but she couldn’t find you either. Anna’s women know everything, so when they hadn’t heard anything, I thought… ”
Questions surged through me, but he continued in a haunted, wooden voice. “I sent a message to Harrison, and when I got a response, it only said he didn’t know where you were. He was searching and hoped you were with me. I sifted through the dead. I followed the lists of casualties, but never found your name. You never came to Registration, so I thought you must have died, that maybe you’d been left behind, or dumped in a mass grave.” He paused for a moment, and his voice lowered. “I couldn’t give up, though. Not until I knew for sure.”
He went silent.
“Lucas?”
“I thought I’d send you to the House. Anna would have taken care of you until I got there. But then I saw how much they wanted you, and I thought if I could get them to play for you, I could win you fairly. I could have gotten you out without anyone knowing. It was the safest way.”
“And then Blake won.”
He sighed. “Yes.”
Nauseated, I let him finish my back, then slid on a loose shirt. “Thank you,” I whispered.
“I gambled with your life,” he said, sitting next to me. “Don’t thank me.”
“I’m alive. You saved me. Again.”
He shook his head, a jerky, irritated gesture.
With no energy to argue, I reached for his arm. “Let me help you now.”
He hesitated only a moment before removing his shirt. The variety of wounds there had my stomach aching with worry—a long slash over his side, bruises darkening his ribs, a puncture wound in his shoulder. The small bullet hole in his upper arm seemed inconsequential in comparison. I examined that one first and sighed my relief when I found an exit wound.
He glared at his arm. “It’ll heal. I’ve been shot like this before. He missed the vital parts.”
With no small relief, I marched him to the bathroom, and he showered away the blood just like I had. After he dried off, I took my time gluing him back together, piece by piece. He submitted to my ministrations with only small hisses of pain. When it was done, we sat on the bed side by side.
“What now?” I asked.
He hesitated for a long moment, then fetched his dirty pants to pull out the Jeep key. “Now’s the painful part.”
“Lucas—”
“You have to leave.”
My hand closed around the key. “Leave?”
“Go home, Sophia. Make them keep you safe.”
