“Most of them will have needed cleaning up, but unless they were unconscious, they probably could have looked after themselves,” I tell her. “It’s all part of being on the ship. The crew like to fuck with each other. Shows they see you as one of us.”
“I started to get suspicious when two of them in a row started talking to me about their crotch rot. They wanted me to inspect it.” She gives a tired smirk, and I have no clue whether she’s joking.
“It’s late, we should be getting to bed,” I say right as the ship rolls against a monster wave and we’re knocked about. When I reach out to steady Reva, my entire back burns. I must not stifle my wince quickly enough as the next thing I know, I’m being prodded by inquisitive fingers.
“You’ve hurt yourself.”
“I’m fine,” I mutter. There’s no way I’m about to admit how much shifting into my other form royally fucks my flesh. My spine feels like it’s on fire right now, and even my bones ache. Sometimes it takes hours for the pain to fade, but it can be days.
She gives me a stern look that, for some reason, makes my dick twitch.
“Leave it,” I grunt.
Rolling her eyes, she scoffs. “How’d they manage to injure you, anyway? Did they lose an arm in the process or something? Those blades looked lethal.”
My head snaps around so violently, I hear it crunch. “What did you just say?”
“Come on.” She nudges me in the gut, leading the way down the stairs as I stare stupidly after her.
“Hold on. Repeat what you just said. What blades are you referring to?”
“The ones that were sticking out of your back.”
The words come out so casually there’s no way she can know how they make everything inside me freeze.
She saw the murderous bear inside me. My shameful secret, out in the open already. I thought I’d have at least a day before she learned I was a true monster.
But I suppose I’ve never been very lucky.
My lower arm burns at her proximity, and I fight the urge to scratch it as I hazard a glance at her. She shouldn’t want to be alone with me, but instead of stopping outside her cabin, she continues stumbling through the passage, running her hands against the walls to steady herself against the movement of the ship.
“Where are you going?”
“Med bay. Unless there’s somewhere else you’d rather go to show me your back?”
In truth, I’d rather no one saw it. I’d rather I weren’t a freakish beast who shreds his skin to ribbons every time his animal emerges. But I learned a long time ago that what I’d rather happen isn’t likely to.
“I don’t actually know where you sleep,” she continues blithely. “So you’ll have to show me if that’s where you’d rather we go.”
I grunt. “Straight up ahead. Second door on the left.”
Might as well get this over with. Mate or not, there’s no chance she won’t scream when she sees the state of my back.
Jack and I share a cabin, but I’m thankful to see he’s nowhere to be seen as we head inside. I drop onto the side of the lower bunk, sucking in a bracing breath as I bend at the waist to grab the handful of potions and balms we keep under the bed. My torn skin stretches, and it’s like I’m being slashed repeatedly with a blunt blade.
Pulling my shirt off, I then twist around. “Have at it.”
She sucks in a breath through her teeth as she takes in my ravaged flesh. “This looks like it hurts a lot.”
“Mhm.”
“How come you’re not the ship’s surgeon when you do such lovely embroidery work?” she says from out of nowhere, nodding to the cross-stitch of a potato on the wall. “Did you maybe forget to wear your readers when you created that masterpiece?”
This woman.
She can see the state my body is in. The torn flesh, the criss-crossed white scars covering every inch of my back and torso, the blades that appear whenever I shift. And yet, she seems entirely unbothered.
“That’s the captain’s work,” I reply. “All the weird embroidery around the ship is his. He ran out of space on his own walls, so we get left with his less creative attempts.”
