“But why is your nose bleeding?”
CHAPTER 25
Blockers
~OCTAVIA~
“The strongest walls aren’t built by enemies..They’re built by people who loved you wrong.”
Blood.
A thin, dark rivulet tracking from Kael’s left nostril down the channel between his nose and his upper lip, catching the bathroom’s warm overhead lighting and glistening against the pale, blue-undertoned skin of his face with the vivid, alarming specificity of a color that did not belong there. The red was arterial—bright, oxygenated, carrying the particular intensity that distinguished a genuine bleed from the cosmetic approximation of one, and my Omega instincts—the ancient, designation-wired, detect-injury-in-your-Alpha circuitry that lived in the deepest architecture of my biology—registered the sight before my conscious mind had finished cataloging its visual properties.
Worry settled into the pit of my stomach with the dense, immediate weight of a stone dropped into still water.
He seemed surprised by my observation. The pale grayeyes blinking once—the rapid, involuntary flutter of a man whose attention had been so fully consumed by the conversation and the woman in the bathtub and the five-year revelation currently rearranging the furniture in both their chests that a physiological event occurring on his own face had gone unnoticed. His hand rose to his nose. Fingers touching the upper lip, finding the wetness, pulling back to examine the red staining the pads of his fingertips with the detached, clinical assessment of a man evaluating damage.
He huffed.
“It’s nothing.”
The dismissal was automatic. Reflexive. The verbal statement no different from a goalkeeper waving off the medical staff after taking a puck to the mask—I’m fine, play on, nothing to see—delivered with the same rigid, ego-first, I-don’t-require-assistance energy that I’d witnessed from this man approximately four hundred times across the years I’d known him and that I had believed approximately zero of those times.
I leaned back in the tub. Let the warm water lap at my collarbones. Tilted my head with the specific, evaluative angle that I employed when I was about to deliver a diagnosis that the patient had not requested.
“Aww, man.” I kept my voice light. Teasing. The tonal register that I deployed when the alternative—genuine, visible, unguarded concern—was a vulnerability I wasn’t ready to display to a man I’d spent the last five years training myself to not care about. “Seeing me naked got you being a pervert, like in those anime shows. Fun.”
He groaned. The sound was long, suffering, and accompanied by an eye-roll so comprehensive that his irises briefly disappeared into the upper architecture of his skull.
“It’s notthat.”
He pushed to his feet—the rigid, I’m-handling-this-myself ascent of a man whose pride wouldn’t permit him to sit on a bathroom floor with blood on his face and an Omega making anime references about his physiological response. He crossed to the sink. Turned the faucet. Splashed water against his nose and upper lip with the rough, graceless efficiency of someone addressing a maintenance issue rather than a medical event, the pink-tinged water swirling in the white porcelain before disappearing down the drain.
Then he reached for the tissue box.
Tore a strip. Rolled it into a cylinder with the expedient, no-finesse technique of a man whose approach to first aid had been developed in hockey locker rooms where the protocol wasplug it and play. And tilted his head backward.
“You’re not supposed to do that.”
My voice shifted from teasing to scolding with the immediate, involuntary authority of a woman who had spent her childhood around athletic injuries and whose father—an Olympic-winning coach whose medical knowledge extended well beyond the standard coaching curriculum—had drilled correct hemorrhage management into her head before she was old enough to spellhemorrhage.
“If you tilt your head back, the blood runs down your throat instead of out your nose, which means you’re swallowing it, which means you’re going to feel nauseous in about four minutes, which means you’re going to end up hovering over a toilet instead of sitting comfortably.” I crossed my arms over the edge of the tub, resting my chin on my forearms. “Tiltforward. Pinch the soft part of the bridge. Hold for ten minutes. Basic physiology, Sørensen.”
He grumbled.
The sound was nonverbal, defiant, carrying the specific,petulant frequency of a man who had been given correct instructions and was philosophically opposed to following them because they had been delivered by someone who was currently naked in his bathtub and therefore, by some internal logic I couldn’t reconstruct, not a valid authority on nasal bleeding protocols.
He kept his head tilted back.
For approximately three seconds.
Then his expression contorted—the brow furrowing, the jaw tightening, the mouth opening as his tongue extended outward in the universal, unmistakable gesture of a human being who had just tasted their own blood and found the experience catastrophically unpleasant. The disgust was total. Facial. A full-body cringe that traveled from his tongue to his shoulders and produced a shudder that made the tissue in his nostril vibrate.
I rolled my eyes.
“Get over here.”
He huffed. But he came.
