She stared. “What?”
“Whoever sent him knew enough to get him onto that balcony with a blade and confidence. He didn’t do that alone.” He looked out the window, his voice turning colder still. “I should’ve taken thirty more seconds and broken him properly.”
The bleak practicality of that nearly stopped her heart.“Magnus.”
He looked back ather.
There was so much in that look she couldn’t sort it all. Anger. Protectiveness. Hunger still trapped on a brutal leash. Something like guilt, though she couldn’t imagine Magnus Severin giving that emotion muchroom.
“If I had been slower,” he said, “that knife would’ve openedyour throat.”
The image hit her so hard she went cold.He saw it happen in her face because his hand came up at once, cupping the back of her neck with possessive steadiness. Tenderness.“Look at me.”
She obeyed.
“No one gets that close to you again,” he announced. “No one.”
The certainty should have frightened her. It should have reminded her that he belonged to a world where men died in courtyards and orders were given over the phone. Instead it settled through her like heat. Like safety with teeth.
The gates of the mansion appeared ahead. They opened before the driver reachedthem.
Elia’s hand never left Magnus’sarm.
When the car stopped beneath the portico, he covered her fingers with his, squeezed once, and then took the cloth from her.“Stay close.”
He got out first, then turned and offered her a hand.She took it.The front doors stood open. Warm light spilled across stone. Security moved in the background with efficient silence. No one approached Magnus directly. No one asked questions. They looked at the blood and understood the first law of powerful houses.
Do not get in theway.
A doctor waited in the foyer with a leather medical bag at his feet.Magnus stopped dead.“What thehell is this?”
The older man barely blinked. “Your brother called. He thought stitches might be useful.”
Of course Leif had.
Irritation flashed across Magnus’s face at once. “I’m fine.”
The doctor’s gaze dipped pointedly to the blood running down Magnus’s arm. “Clearly.”
Magnus’s expression darkened, the same lethal temper that had sent the assassin over the balcony flashing briefly across hisface.
Elia stepped closer. “You’re not fine.”
His head turned toward her.The fury didn’t vanish. Neither did the adrenaline. But something in him yielded just enough to let common sense through.The words carried the edge of command. “Make it quick.”
Magnus shrugged out of his tux jacket before the doctor could answer. The movement was abrupt, impatient. His fingers tore at the studs of his shirt. One popped free. Then another. Then a half dozen of them scattered across the floor. The fabric split open under the force of his grip and he dragged it off, leaving him bare from the waistup.
Blood streaked his upper arm where the knife had opened him, dark against the hard planes of muscle across his shoulder and chest. The violence of the fight still clung to him. Heat still radiated from him, along with the raw edge of danger that hadn’t yet faded from hisbody.
For one disorienting second she couldn’t lookaway.
Magnus didn’t seem aware of the effect. He dropped the ruined shirt to the floor and sat without waiting for instruction, bracing his forearm against the table as if the wound were nothing more than an inconvenience.
The doctor stepped forward with the suture kit. Magnus’s gaze lifted instead—toElia.
She couldn’t look away as the needle pierced his skin. The small, efficient motion should have been clinical, detached, yet every pull of the thread tightened something inside her chest. Blood had already begun to dry along the edge of the wound, dark against the hard line of muscle across his arm. Magnus didn’t so much as flinch.
He watched her the entiretime.
