She stirred at his touch.
“Shh,” he murmured, the sound barely more than a breath. “Sleep.”
But her eyes were already opening—wide blue eyes glazed with exhaustion and the remnants of fever. She blinked up at him, confusion slowly giving way to recognition.
“Tarek?”
His name in her small voice made his heart clench with a protective instinct so fierce it frightened him.
“Go back to sleep,” he said softly. “I was just adjusting your blanket.”
“Oh.” She didn’t seem alarmed to find him looming over her in the darkness. She didn’t seem alarmed by anything about him, actually—not his size, or his claws, or the eyes he knew were glowing faintly in the dim light. She simply accepted his presence as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Children,he thought.They trust so easily.
He should have found it unsettling. Instead, it made that ache in his chest worse.
Dani’s gaze drifted around the room, taking in the stone walls, the flickering shadows, the unfamiliar surroundings. When her eyes returned to his face, there was a question in them.
“Are you staying with us?”
The words were barely a whisper, slurred with sleep. But beneath them, he heard what she was really asking.Are you going to be here when I wake up? Are you going to protect us? Can I trust you?
His beast rose up, fierce and certain.Yes, little one. I will stay. I will protect you both. I will?—
“Yes,” he heard himself say. The word came out rough, stripped of the careful control he usually maintained. “I’m staying.”
Her small face relaxed. The tension he hadn’t even noticed, a subtle wariness in that fragile body, melted away, and she snuggled deeper into the furs with a soft sigh.
“Good,” she murmured. “Jessa worries too much. But you’re here now.”
And then, between one breath and the next, she was asleep again.
He stood frozen for a long moment, staring down at her. At the trust written so clearly in every line of her small form. At the peaceful expression on her face.
You’re here now.
As if his presence alone was enough to ease her fears. As if the simple fact of him—exiled, dangerous, barely civilized—could offer any kind of safety to a sick child.
He pulled the blanket up carefully, tucking it around her shoulders with hands that weren’t quite steady. Then he stepped back, turned, and fled.
The main room felt too small suddenly. Too close. He paced its length once, twice, trying to work off the strange energy coiling through him. His beast was restless, agitated by the encounter, wanting things he had no right to want.
He needed a distraction. Something to occupy his hands and his mind until the sun rose and he could think clearly again.
His gaze fell on the shelf of books near the fireplace. Medical texts, most of them. Books salvaged from the wreckage of his former life and carried across the stars even though he’d had no practical reason to keep them. He’d told himself at the time that knowledge was always valuable, even if he had no intention of using his skills again.
He hadn’t opened them in years.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he crossed to the shelf and pulled down one of the older volumes. Its spine was cracked, its pages yellowed with age, but the information inside remained sound.
He settled into the chair near the fire, the one he’d carved himself during his first winter here, when the loneliness had threatened to drive him mad, and opened the book.
The familiar language washed over him like a half-forgotten dream. Symptoms and causes. Progressions and prognoses. The precise, clinical vocabulary of healing that had once been as natural to him as breathing.
He found the section on chronic respiratory conditions and began to read.
Persistent cough with or without productive sputum. Low-grade fever. Gradual weight loss. Difficulty breathing during physical exertion or in cold conditions…
