He froze mid-motion.
Blair’s voice dropped, quiet but edged with steel. “I’ve seen the bruises you’ve taken since last night. It’s been almost twenty-four hours. You will stop what you’re doing and take off your shirt. Now.”
He blinked at her, throat tightening with something that wasn’t pain.
He’d been ordered by officers who outranked him. He’d been screamed at by instructors who would have drowned him without blinking. He’d been hit, kicked, cut, burned, beaten bloody. He’d endured men who wanted him dead and men who wanted him broken.
None of that made him hesitate the way her words did.
She wasn’t barking at him, challenging him, or belittling him.
She was…taking care of him, and he had no idea how to process that.
No idea how to accept it. No idea how to let someone that close when his entire survival strategy was built on never letting anyone this close.
He stared at her for a beat too long, heart thudding like he’d been dropped into icy water.
Her eyes softened, barely, but enough to hit him somewhere under the bruises.
“Kelly,” she said, voice gentler now, “take off your shirt.”
Something inside him buckled.
He reached for the hem, slow and uncertain, the motion foreign as breathing in a new language.
Breakneck got the shirt halfway over his head before he winced, ribs pulling in sharp, unpleasant lines across his chest. Blair stepped closer without hesitation and tugged the fabric free the rest of the way, her fingers brushing the top of his shoulder as she did. The contact shot through him like heat under his skin.
She sucked in a breath when she saw the bruises. He expected pity or shock. He got neither. What he saw in her eyes was anger on his behalf. Controlled, quiet, focused. It hit him deeper than pain ever had.
“Christ,” she murmured. “How are you even upright?”
He didn’t answer. Didn’t trust his voice to work. His ribs looked worse than he realized, mottled purple and black along his side, spreading up over his lower back like spilled ink.
Blair opened the jar, scooping the cream onto her fingers. The scent of eucalyptus and menthol cut through the metallic tang of weapon oil and dust in the room. She stepped into his space, close enough that her breath touched the bruises on his chest.
“Hold still,” she said.
Her hands went to his ribs.
Breakneck jerked from the slow and gentle way she touched him, the pain was distant, but her attention foreign. She applied the cream in smooth, circular motions, the glide of her palms warm and careful. His breath caught, ribs protesting under the pressure, but his body leaning toward it anyway.
He closed his eyes. He had been touched in many ways, rough hands, demanding hands, hurried hands that didn’t care if they hurt him, hands that wanted something from him and nothing of him. His mind betrayed him with a flash of memory from Dusty’s, that woman’s nails digging into his shoulders, the predatory hunger in her eyes, the way he’d felt afterward. Shame heated his skin, dark and familiar, empty and savage.
Nothing like this. Blair’s touch was soft in the places he had never known softness, giving. Steady in the places he had only known violence. Warm where he had learned to endure cold.
“Tell me if I’m hurting you,” she said quietly, fingers working over the sharpest bruise along his side.
“You aren’t,” he managed, though his throat felt scraped raw. It wasn’t true, not physically, but the ache wasn’t what mattered.
Something in his chest loosened, something he hadn’t realized he was clenching, something he wasn’t sure he knew how to hold steady now that it was slipping free. The shape of his breathing changed under her hands, the walls he had built without even thinking began to shift.
Blair moved to his back, fingers gliding along the bruises there, working the cream into swollen muscle. He felt her breath on his shoulder, soft and warm, and every nerve in his body lit up as if waking from a long sleep.
He swallowed hard. “You don’t have to do this.”
She didn’t stop. “Yes, I do.”
She was just so goddamned direct.
