“This will hurt.”
He extracted the shard of what looked like glass from beneath her smallest toe, and she flinched when it came free, a soft gasp escaping her throat.
“Sorry. How’s your throat?”
“Hurts. Like everything else.”
The confession landed as intended, with pointed accuracy. This was his fault.
“You should have used your safeword when Volkov gave you the chance. You could have ended this.”
“Would it have mattered?”
He looked sharply at her, then understood she was referring to what happened with Hadrian Welles. “Yes. Your words matter.”
“So does money.”
He knew what people would sell for a few lousy beans. “Some things are worth?—”
“Please don’t talk to me about the cost of dignity when you live in luxury.”
He could have corrected her. Could have told her that he was born in the bowels of London and that he understood more about poverty than most ever could. But he said nothing.
Her desperation, her determination, her hunger, they were all part of her story, not his. “You’re right.”
It didn’t matter that he could still taste the metallic edge of starvation, still feel the hollow ache of wanting something he was never meant to have. It had been years since he had actually gone without, and he had lost the right to speak on such matters.
She didn’t make a sound when he applied the antiseptic, despite the sting. Another memory as permanent as his scars.
The Chancellor’s servants moved like ghosts through those halls, deaf and blind to his suffering back then. No matter how loudly he cried, no one would rescue him, no one would help.
So he’d stopped crying. Learned to clean himself up and stand again, even when his skin burned like fire and he shook from the pain. He clenched his teeth and bore it, just as she did now.
Controlled.
Soldiers have less composure.
Once clean, he worked the ointment into her ravaged soles. His thumbs pressed into her arch as the salve warmed on her skin.
A sound escaped her throat, but not pain this time, something closer to relief. Her foot flexed instinctively against his palm, toes curling, and the movement sent a pulse of heat through him hard enough to make his cock twitch.
Stop.
He spread the liniment across her heel. Worked it into the ball of her foot, feeling the small bones shift beneath her skin, the delicate framework of tendons and ligaments.
She’s so small.
Her foot barely filled his palm. Built for dancing, not for war. Everything about her was so small. Breakable.
His hands slowed.
Her skin warmed beneath his touch, and he found himself lingering. Tracing the curve of her arch with more attention than the task required. Feeling the rabbit-quick flutter of her pulse beneath her ankle bone, his gaze climbed.
Past her ankle to the slender column of her calf. Higher. To the soft swell of her knee, and the tender hollow behind it. Higher still. The pale expanse of her lush inner thighs parted slightly.
His gaze fell into the shadows beneath the fabric of his ruined shirt, where the material had ridden up.
Christ.
