"His pressure's holding," Jess says without turning. She knows I'm here. She always knows when I'm in the room, even if she won't admit it.
"Good." I cross my arms and lean against the doorframe. "You need to eat something."
"Later."
"You said that two hours ago."
"Then I'll say it again in two more."
I pull a granola bar from my back pocket and set it on the counter beside her. She glances at it, then at me.
"I raided the vending machine. Don't worry, I left money."
Her mouth twitches.
Thunder cracks overhead, close and sharp, and the walls shudder. The lights flicker. The spinal patient groans, and Jess adjusts his morphine drip and murmurs to him until he settles. I pass her a fresh pair of gloves from the box on the tray, and she takes them without looking, snapping them on while she reads the monitor.
The hours blur after that. I hold an ice pack for the woman when she wakes crying at three in the morning, talking to her about nothing, the weather, fishing season, the crab shack on the boardwalk that makes the best po'boys on the coast, until the pain medication pulls her back under. Jess watches me from across the room while she charts. Her pen moves, but her gaze doesn't.
The clinic creaks around us, a deep structural complaint that vibrates through my boots. Wind finds the gaps between the plywood boards and screams through them, high-pitched and relentless, and rain hammers the roof in sheets so heavy the ceiling tiles tremble.
Then something hits the roof.
Not wind, not rain. A concussive crack that splits the air like a mortar round and detonates through every surface at once, and the entire structure jolts sideways on its foundation. Metal screeches. Glass shatters somewhere down the back hall. The overhead lights pop and die, plunging everything into the green pulse of battery monitors and the sickly yellow glow of our lanterns.
I'm already moving toward Jess, every orc instinct firing at once—
And then I smell it.
Her scent changes. Not a shift, an erasure. The warm vanilla base note that lives underneath everything Jess is, the note I've chased for eight months, the one I smell in my sleep, vanishes. Gone in a single breath, replaced by something acrid and chemical that burns my sinuses and turns my stomach. Pure terror. Not the sharp spike of a loud noise scared me but something older and buried deeper, fear that lives in muscle memory and nerve endings and surfaces without permission, without warning, without mercy.
My feet stop. My arms go slack at my sides.
She stands in the middle of the trauma bay with her fists clenched at her thighs, knuckles bone-white against the blue of her scrubs. Her chest doesn't move. Her gaze bores straight through me, fixed on a point I can't reach, in a place I've never been.
A sound crawls out of her throat. Small and involuntary—the noise of a person caught between the present and the worst day of their life,and it hits me so hard my vision grays at the edges.
Every nerve I own screamsgrab her.Pick her up. Put myself between her and whatever ghost walked into this room. My muscles lock with the effort of not moving, because I know, from Knox, from the brothers who served, from late-night conversations at the clubhouse where men twice my size talked about the things that followed them home from war, that touch without permission makes it worse. You don't grab someone in a flashback. You anchor them with your voice. You give them a fixed point and let them find their own way back.
I drop to a crouch, bringing myself down to her eye level instead of towering over her. Two feet of space between my knees and her legs, enough room that she doesn't feel trapped.
"Jess." I pitch it low and steady,the same tone I use on an engine that won't turn over, which is a ridiculous comparison, but it's what I have."Look at me."
Nothing. Her focus stays locked on the middle distance, on whatever replays behind it.
"You're in Nightfall Cove. You're in the clinic. It's raining outside, and you're safe." I keep my voice even, keep breathing through the acrid wrongness of her scent. "I'm right here, and nothing is getting through that door."
Her breathing hitches. Stops. Starts again, shallow and ragged.
I stay still. A low rumble builds in my chest, deep enough to vibrate through the floor between us—the subvocal sound orcs make without thinking, the one I've used on spooked horses and I've never aimed at a person before. I let it and my scent do what my hands can't, fill the space between us with something that belongs to this room, this moment, instead of whatever desert road or convoy or burning vehicle she's trapped in. I don't know if she registers it on a conscious level, but her ribcage expands a fraction deeper. The muscles in her forearms loosen by a degree.
I keep talking. About nothing, about everything—the rain, the clinic, the time Rex's bike threw a chain on the coast road and we spent four hours rebuilding it in a ditch. Anything to give her my voice to grab onto and drag herself back. The vitals monitor pulses beside us, and the walls protest each gust, and the storm rages on, and I don't stop talking until she blinks.
Her focus shifts, the middle distance dissolving, the present reassembling around her in pieces. The trauma bay. The monitors. The lantern on the counter. Me, crouched in front of her with my fists on my own knees and my heart slamming so hard she'd hear it if she pressed her ear to my chest.
She sees me.
The shame hits her face before I can stop it—a flush climbing her neck into her cheeks, her chin ducking, her attention wrenching away from mine.
