7
Lucian
The world narrows to a hiss and the salt taste of iron. For a second, I am certain I am going to fold like a bad suit—snap, crease, gone—and then the body remembers how to move. I roll with the impact, the alley light slashing over brick, and come up on one elbow. Pain blooms along my right side, sharp and hot, a line of fire that takes my breath. It’s wrong to flinch but I do. Instinct is a cruel, honest thing.
Elias is a frantic shadow above me before I can tell him not to be. He’s already across my chest, fingers working like a thing that does not question its orders: pulling open my jacket, ripping at the fabric of my shirt. He smells like the gala still—cologne, sweat, the metallic hint of adrenaline—and for a moment the world is nothing but the vacuum of him over me and the wet dark blooming on my side.
“Go inside,” I tell him. The order is a useless, small thing, the kind that men say to keep the performance of control when they have none. My voice sounds like it’s someone else’s voice, sunken and foreign.
“No. You’re bleeding.” He answers like a thing made of iron. His eyes are wide and dark and there’s terror in the way his jaw is set. He shouts then into the street, and the sound scatters like birds. “Get our fucking driver, now!”
I watch him bark orders, clumsy and precise at once, as if he’s learned to act in emergencies by watching men like my captains. A car pulls up, the engine coughing, and a face leans across the open window—Riley’s driver, I think, or one of my men who happened to be near enough. Elias is already hauling me, one arm under my shoulders, the other under my knees. He’s stronger than I thought he’d be. He moves me with a frightening competence.
“You should go in,” I tell him again when he hoists me into the backseat, but he stares at me like I’ve suggested something absurd. “Enjoy the party.”
“I’m not leaving you,” he says simply.
There is no bravado in it. Just a flat, dangerous, truthful thing. The car lurches away from the alley and the city blurs into streaks of light. I can taste the copper of the wound, sharper now that the rush of adrenaline has slid into a cold shock. The vehicle’s motion makes the pain bloom like a houseplant pushed into sunlight.
“Stay still,” I say. It is not a plea exactly; it is a practical instruction. He obeys, inefficient and intense, his hands trembling on the fabric of my shirt like they’re measuring the line of my ribs.
“You’re bleeding a lot.” He’s almost accusing, but I hear the tremor under his voice. It’s not just blood. It’s concern, and concern is a weapon that makes me stupid, because the truth is I am not used to being tended.
He moves my shirt up despite my quiet resistance, and his hand drifts to the place where the bullet grazed me. It’s a meancut, too close to the ribs. It bleeds under his fingers, hot and sticky. There’s a pretty red line and the skin around it is bruising.
He winces at the sight and I wonder what he sees beneath the surface. I have a body that tells stories—old scars, a map of violence. Knife runs across the hip, a healed raggedness near the shoulder from a fight that almost meant my throat, the faded crescent across my cheek where someone thought to mark me when I was younger. Knights collect medals; men like me collect evidence of what we do and who tries to stop us. The flesh is a ledger.
The shirt falls open and the world of skin is a survey I am not often afforded. The light from the passing streetlamps catches on the ridges of old scars: pale, puckered, testimony to the language of survival. Up close they look less like trophies and more like weathered geography. There’s a dryness to the skin around them; even flesh keeps its memory.
“You’re a mess,” he says, the words out of habit more than criticism. There’s an odd soft edge to it that makes my chest tighten.
He doesn’t avert his eyes when he should. Instead, he stares, curious and clumsy and untrained. The thing he can’t know—what he’s looking at is not only the map of violence but the shape of the man who’s lived inside it. Sometimes I look at those marks and I don’t recognize who they belonged to. They belong to a poem I never wanted to write.
“Get my bag,” I tell him when the car pulls into the manor. He presses his palms to the bandage as if holding a dam. For an instant, I like the sight of him: focused, necessary, hands moving with purpose. It makes me feel less fragile.
“No hospital?” he asks, breathless, as if the question is both an insult and a test.
“I have what I need here,” I say.
He gives me a look like I’ve chosen a harder path for both of us. He’s not a man to flinch from hard work; he was raised in a household where hands earned what mouths wanted. But medical training is different. There’s a fear in his eyes under the anger, an admission he doesn’t vocalize: he is out of his element and yet he refuses to leave.
We get inside and the manor is colder than the alley, but safer in the perverse way of old places. I’m leaning heavily against his shoulder, trying to focus. The back hall is a corridor I know well, lined with photographs and trophies and the quiet things that say we existed before this night. He sets me down on a leather chair in my room that smells like cedar and paper and old decisions.
“Bring me the kit, under the sink,” I say.
He runs without being told. The house moves like a well-oiled thing when given an order: a tray with a medical kit appears, alcohol, needle, thread, gauze, and an old sewing kit, the sort of thing my mother might have used—an ironic contraband at the edge of a modern life.
He cleans the wound roughly, his thumb pressing like a tourniquet until the blood slows and his jaw is white with concentration. His breathing is shallow. He swallows hard, and I can see the raw edge beneath his bravado.
“You know what you’re doing?” I ask, because curiosity is a tool I use to steady myself.
“Kind of,” he snaps too quickly. “I—no. I’m not a medic. I just…took care of my brothers. Wounds, stitches, gun shots.” He keeps working. The truth is he is a mixture of tact and terror, and that combination produces efficiency.
He loads the needle and the thread trembles in his fingers. He finds the right angle with a sort of reckless accuracy. How he learned it I don’t know; perhaps you grow up in a house where men disappear and you have to hold wounds shut becausethere’s no one else to do it. Perhaps it’s just the way his hands are—capable, the fingers long and sure despite not knowing the names for the instruments he uses.
The first stitch is a small knife of pain, but I try not to shudder in his hands. He curses under his breath, softer than I would have expected, and keeps going. He’s clumsy sometimes—the knot uneven, the thread taut more than I want—but he learns fast enough. By the time he finishes, the bleeding has slowed to a stubborn seep.
“You stitch like an amateur,” I tell him, half to rile him and half because he needs the humor.
