I do. His face is carefully blank. But his jaw is doing the thing—the Graves jaw, the muscle jumping, the teeth clenched on something he's choosing not to say. I know what he's not saying. I can see it in the way his bound hands are trembling. Not from the sedative.
I yank my pants back on.
We don't talk about it.
The morning passes in loaded silence. Not awkward—something else. Something heavier. The silence of two people who've crossed a line neither of them can see from this side. Who shared something so enormous and so intimate that the words for it haven't been invented yet, or if they have, neither of us knows how to say them out loud in a concrete cell with a camera in the corner and a drain in the floor.
So we don't.
The food slot scrapes. Two trays. Protein bars. Water. An apple this time—one, not two. I split it with the edge of a plastic tray and give Bane the bigger half. He eats it slowly. His hands shake when he lifts the water bottle to his lips.
I watch him and the worry settles deeper. How much sedative can a body metabolize before something gives? His fine motor control is shot. His pupils are uneven—the left slightly larger than the right. When he stands to use the drain, his legs buckle on the first step and I catch him. Arm around his waist. His weight against my shoulder.
"I'm fine," he says.
"You're a terrible liar."
"Family trait."
The suppressant injection comes at what I think is midmorning. The woman in scrubs—the Nurse, capital N—arrives with her tray and her clipboard and a guard I don't recognize. She checks my vitals. Draws blood. Administers theheat blocker into the crook of my arm. The cold floods through me and the low simmer in my belly goes flat.
Dead. The pilot light snuffed.
I exhale. The relief is so profound my eyes sting.
She turns to Bane. New syringe. Sedative. His jaw tightens but he holds out his arm without being asked. Then, before she can push the plunger:
"He needs bandages." Bane nods toward me. His voice is slurred at the edges but the words are deliberate. Chosen. "Antibiotic ointment. Gauze. The welts on his back—one of them is splitting and the skin's hot. If it gets infected, your product loses value. I'm sure Mr. Ellis wouldn't appreciate damaged merchandise."
The words taste bitter in the air. I can see what it costs him to say them—to reduce me to product, to speak their language, to frame my pain as a business problem rather than a human one.
But he holds the Nurse's gaze and waits.
She looks at him. At me. At her clipboard. Then she reaches into her kit—a small tube of bacitracin, a packet of gauze pads, a roll of medical tape. Sets them on the mattress without a word.
She pushes the plunger. Bane doesn't flinch. Caps the syringe. Packs her tray. Leaves.
"Turn around," Bane tells me before the sedative can take hold. Racing it. Maybe ninety seconds of clarity left.
I turn. He peels the scrub top up. His bound hands make the work clumsy—fumbling with the tube, squeezing too much ointment, his fingers thick and imprecise against my skin. But he's careful. So careful. He dabs the bacitracin along the worst welt with the pad of his thumb, then presses a gauze square over it and tears tape with his teeth to hold it in place.
"Two more," he murmurs. Working faster now. I can hear the sedative arriving in his voice—the consonants softening, the pauses stretching. He tapes the second pad. Starts on the third. His fingers slow. Fumble.
"I've got it," I say.
"Almost—" He smooths the last strip of tape. Pulls my shirt down. "Done."
By the time I turn around, he's already fading. His eyes have gone glassy—the sedative catching up, claiming the ground he burned through to take care of me first. His shoulders loosen. His head tips back against the wall.
"Bane. Come on. Lie down."
"'M fine." Slurred. His tongue thick in his mouth. "Just... fuzzy."
He's more than fuzzy. I guide him sideways, easing him down onto the mattress. His body goes liquid the second his back hits the foam—tension draining out of him like water through a cracked glass. His eyes flutter. Close. Open halfway. Close again.
I pull the wool blanket up over his chest. Sit beside him on the edge of the frame.
He looks different like this. Not smaller—Bane could never look small—but quieter. The sharp angles of his jaw softened against the thin mattress. The furrow between his brows smoothed out for once, the permanent tension he carries in his face finally released. His lashes are longer than I realized. Dark against his cheekbones in the flat fluorescent light. The raw skin around his wrists where the zip ties dig in—red, chafed, the padding I made from the mattress cover already slipping—and my fingers find them before I can stop myself. Adjusting the fabric strips. Tucking the edges back under the plastic. Gentle.
