He lies on the cold stone. The stitches pull when he breathes. The salve numbs the worst of the pain, a small mercy he did not ask for and was given anyway.
He thinks about the boy. About the steadiness of his hands and the fear in his scent and the bruise on his throat that wasn't made by a beast. About the fact that the guards called him Lamb, and the boy didn't correct them, and the name settled on him with the weight of something old and worn and accepted.
He thinks about that voice.
Don't worry. I'm going to help you.
Zazyrus closes his eyes. The rage is still there, burning, constant. But beside it, stubborn and unwelcome, something else flickers. Small. Nameless. Inconvenient.
He doesn't sleep for a long time.
Chapter three
Chapter 3
The stitches hold.
Lethe checks them the next morning, kneeling on the cold stone of Zazyrus's cage with his satchel open and his hands steady and the beast sitting exactly where Lethe left him the night before. It's possible he hasn't moved. It's possible he sat there all night, bleeding through the linen, watching the dark with those black eyes that give Lethe nothing to work with.
"Good news," Lethe says, leaning close to examine the line of stitches along Zazyrus's ribs. "No sign of infection. You're healing fast." He sits back on his heels and opens his tin of salve. "I'm going to clean these again and re-dress them. Same as last night. You know the routine."
Zazyrus doesn't respond. He hasn't spoken a word since Lethe first entered his cage, and Lethe is beginning to suspect he won't. Some fighters don't. Some have had language beaten out of them by owners who preferred silence. Some never had it. Lethe doesn't know which category Zazyrus falls into and he doesn't push. He just talks, the way he always talks, filling the silencewith the steady narration that keeps his hands calm and his pulse manageable.
"This will sting. I'm sorry. Hold still for me."
He presses the salve-soaked cloth to the gash on Zazyrus's ribs and the beast's breath catches, a sharp intake through his teeth, and the muscle beneath Lethe's hand contracts hard. Lethe holds the cloth steady and waits. The tension eases, fractionally, and Lethe resumes cleaning.
He's trying not to look.
He's failing.
Zazyrus is shirtless, the same as yesterday, and the cage is better lit today because Lethe brought a second lantern and hung it from the bar above the door. The additional light was practical. Necessary. He needs to see the wounds clearly to treat them properly. That is the reason he brought the lantern and there is no other reason and the fact that the extra light illuminates Zazyrus in warm, golden detail is incidental and irrelevant and Lethe needs to stop noticing it.
But he notices.
The breadth of him. Zazyrus is large in a way that Lethe's body understands on an instinctive level, something animal and old that registers the sheer mass of the creature in front of him and catalogs it as dangerous. His shoulders are wide, thick with muscle that shifts and flexes with every breath. His chest is broad and deep and scarred, layered with evidence of years of fighting, and beneath the scars his skin is dark and warm-toned and covered in markings that Lethe doesn't recognize. They trace patterns across his pectorals, down his sternum, over his ribs, disappearing beneath the waistband of his pants in lines that Lethe's eyes follow before he can stop them.
Stop it.
He refocuses on the wound. Cleans it with careful strokes. Applies fresh salve. His fingers brush the unmarked skin besidethe gash and it's warm, warmer than Lethe expected, and the texture is rougher than it looks. Not unpleasant. The heat of Zazyrus's body radiates against Lethe's knuckles and he becomes abruptly aware of how close he is. How close he has to be to do this work. His face is inches from Zazyrus's torso and he can see the individual ridges of his abdominal muscles and the fine, dark hair that trails down from his navel and he can smell him, underneath the blood and the damp stone, something warm and animal and distinctly male.
Lethe's pulse does something it hasn't done in a very long time.
It quickens. Not from fear. Not from the controlled, managed spike of adrenaline he's trained himself to regulate when entering the cages. This is different. This is heat, sudden and unwelcome, pooling low in his belly and spreading outward, and he doesn't recognize it at first because it's been so long. Years. Years since his body responded to another body with anything other than dread or detachment or the flat, dissociated nothing he retreats into when Demos comes for him.
He hasn't felt desire in years. Hasn't felt that pull, that awareness, that specific tightening of attention that narrows the world down to skin and proximity and the shape of someone else's body. He thought that part of him was dead. He thought Demos had killed it, the way Demos kills everything he touches, ground it down to nothing through sheer repetition of taking and hurting until Lethe's body learned that want was just another word for pain.
But his hands are on Zazyrus's ribs and his face is inches from the hard plane of his stomach and his body is responding and Lethe doesn't know what to do with it. It confuses him. It frightens him. Not the arousal itself, but what it means: that something he thought was gone is still there, buried, stirring, reaching toward a creature who could kill him with one hand.
He keeps working. He keeps talking. His voice doesn't waver because he has six years of practice at keeping his voice level while the rest of him falls apart.
"Shoulder next," he says. "Lean forward for me? Just a little. I need to see the back of it."
Zazyrus shifts. The movement is slow, controlled, and it brings his body closer to Lethe's and the warmth of him intensifies. Lethe's fingers find the edge of the wound on his shoulder and he cleans it with steady hands, re-dresses it, checks the stitches. His eyes trace the line of Zazyrus's trapezius, the thick cord of muscle that runs from his neck to his shoulder, and the markings that follow the contour of it in dark, deliberate patterns. Up close they're intricate. Beautiful, in a way that Lethe has no business thinking about a patient.
He can feel Zazyrus's eyes on him. Has felt them since he entered the cage. The weight of that gaze is a physical thing, pressing against Lethe's skin, tracking every movement of his hands with the same predatory focus he observed last night. Zazyrus watches him the way he probably watches everything: cataloging, assessing, filing away details for later use. Lethe doesn't know what details Zazyrus is filing about him and he's not sure he wants to.
"Forehead," Lethe says. He shifts on his knees and reaches up and Zazyrus's face is right there, close, and the angles of it are sharper in the lamplight. The jaw, squared and heavy, clenched tight. The cheekbones, high and prominent. The horns curving back from his temples in dark arcs, smooth and ridged and close enough to touch. His eyes are nearly black and they don't blink and Lethe holds his gaze for a moment that stretches too long before he drops his attention to the butterfly bandages on Zazyrus's brow.
