"What do I do first?" she asks, her voice steadying, locking away the panic in a dark box at the back of her mind.
"The iodine," I say. "Pour it directly into the wound. You have to clean it out entirely before you stitch it closed, or the infection will kill me by morning."
She grabs the heavy brown plastic bottle. She uncaps it.
"Thayer, this is going to hurt," she whispers, her hand hovering over my ruined shoulder.
"I know," I reply, my jaw clenching, bracing myself for the impact. "Do it."
She tips the bottle.
The dark, amber liquid floods directly into the open, gaping trench of my torn muscle.
A blinding, catastrophic explosion of pure, white-hot agony entirely obliterates my nervous system. I roar, a dark, feral sound of pure, unadulterated suffering that tears from the deepest part of my chest. My back arches violently off the cheap mattress, my uninjured right hand shooting out and gripping the metal headboard so hard the steel actually bends under my fingers.
"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" Sybil sobs, completely terrified by my reaction, but she doesn't stop. She forces the rest of the iodine into the wound, completely flushing the dirt, the ash, and the coagulated blood from the severed tissue.
I cannot breathe. The pain is a physical entity, a demon tearing my flesh apart from the inside out. I squeeze my eyes shut, my entire body locking into rigid, trembling knots of absolute agony.
"Okay, okay, it's clean," she gasps, dropping the empty bottle onto the carpet.
I force my eyes open, staring at the water-stained ceiling, dragging ragged, jagged gasps of air into my burning lungs. "The needle. Thread it."
She reaches into the Pelican case. Her hands are covered in my blood and the dark brown stain of the iodine. She fumbles with the sterile packaging of the curved surgical needle and the thick, black nylon suture thread.
"There's lidocaine in here," she says frantically, holding up a small glass vial and a syringe. "I can numb it. Thayer, let me numb it."
"No time," I grind out, the fever completely ravaging my clarity. "It takes ten minutes to take effect. If we get raided, I cannot be numb. I need to feel my arm. Just sew the fucking skin together, Sybil."
She stares at me, entirely horrified by the sheer, psychotic resilience of my command. To push a curved needle through raw, un-anesthetized muscle is a form of medieval torture. But she looks at the dark, stubborn finality in my eyes and realizes that I will not yield.
She threads the needle. She grabs a pair of surgical hemostats, clamping the metal jaws securely around the curve of the needle to give her leverage.
She leans over me again. Her face is mere inches from my chest. I can feel the frantic, erratic puff of her breath against my collarbone.
"I have to pull the edges together," she whispers, her voice completely broken.
"Do it."
She places her left hand against the outer edge of the wound, pressing down, physically forcing the jagged, severed halves of my muscle back together. The pain spikes again, a blinding flare that makes my vision go completely black for a fraction of a second.
Then, the needle pierces my skin.
It is a slow, agonizing intrusion. She has to force the heavy steel through the thick, tough epidermis, driving it deep into the muscle bed before curving it back up through the opposite side of the wound.
I bite down on the inside of my cheek until the sharp, metallic tang of copper floods my mouth. I refuse to scream again. I refuse to terrify her any further. I lock my gaze onto her face, entirely anchoring my sanity to the beautiful, frantic concentration pulling her brows together.
She pulls the black thread tight. The skin puckers, pulling closed. She ties a swift, clumsy surgical knot, securing the first stitch.
"One," she breathes, a tear slipping off her chin to land directly on my bare chest.
She moves half an inch down. The needle pierces my flesh again.
I watch her. I watch the woman I kidnapped, the woman I manipulated, the woman I completely isolated from the world, deliberately driving a steel needle into my body to keep me alive. The intimacy of the act is profound. It is a terrifying, twisted inversion of the power dynamic. She holds my life in her bloody, trembling hands. She is causing me excruciating, blinding pain, and the darkest, most irredeemable part of my soul is absolutely, entirely obsessed with her for it.
She belongs to me.The thought is a narcotic, a dark, heavy drug that numbs the edges of the agony.
She pushes the needle through a third time. A fourth.
