He doesn't answer. Just stands there, rigid as iron, letting me take a fraction of his weight while the rest of him stays carefully,deliberately separate. I feel his pulse where my hand presses against his side. Too fast. A heart that size shouldn't beat that fast.
I decide not to push. Not yet. There's time. We have miles ahead of us and nothing but road to fill them.
“Come on.” I shift my grip, guiding him toward the barn door. “One step at a time. You can brood about your tragic backstory while we walk.”
The sound he makes isn't quite a laugh. But it's closer than anything I've heard from him yet.
We make three miles before he admits we need to stop.
He's gray beneath the bronze of his skin, a sick undertone that speaks of blood loss and fever and a body running on nothing but stubbornness. His breathing has gone shallow, each inhale shorter than the last. The tremor in his hands has spread to his arms, to his shoulders, to the muscles in his back that I can feel jumping under my palm.
An old farmhouse sits at the edge of a fallow field, roof partially collapsed but walls mostly solid. It'll do. It has to.
I steer us through the overgrown yard, through a doorway that he has to duck to enter. One room still has most of its ceiling, and there's a fireplace built into the far wall, blackened with old soot but intact.
He lowers himself against the wall furthest from the door while I set about building a fire. I gather what dry wood I can find from the collapsed section, breaking apart an old chair that's more rot than furniture, arrange it all in the fireplace with hands that know the work by heart.
I can feel him watching me.
It's not uncomfortable, exactly. Just present. That steady amber gaze tracking my movements the way it tracked my hands last night, in the ditch, while I stitched him back together.
“You should rest too,” he says.
“After.”
“After what?”
“After I check your wounds. After I make sure the infection isn't winning. After I do the job I'm apparently oath-bound to keep doing until something tries to eat me.” I strike flint against steel, catch a spark, nurse it into flame. “You're very demanding for someone who claims he doesn't want me around.”
“I never said I didn't want you around.”
I look up from the growing fire. He's watching me, and the flames catch, grow, throw dancing shadows across his face and turn his eyes to something closer to gold. My hands stop moving on the flint.
“I said I wasn't safe,” he continues. “That's different.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.” He shifts against the wall, winces as the movement pulls at something, settles back with a careful exhale. The wound on his side has started seeping again, a dark stain spreading through the bandage. “Wanting and having are different things. For my kind, they have to be.”
The words land somewhere under my ribs. I don't look at his face.
So I do what I always do. I work.
I cross to him, kneel at his side, start unwrapping the bandage. Even kneeling upright, the wound on his side is at my eye level. The one on his shoulder is above my head. I have to reach up and work with my arms raised, fingers going numb from the angle. The heat radiates off him even before I touch the skin. I keep my touch clinical. Professional. The fact that my patient is an oath-bound Bogatyr who just implied something about wanting shouldn't change anything.
It doesn't change anything.
His hand twitches when I peel back the last layer of bandage.
I glance up. He's not looking at my face anymore. He's looking at my hands. Watching them move across his wound, tracking every motion of my fingers.
“Something wrong?”
“No.” His voice has dropped lower. Rougher. “Your hands.”
“What about them?”
“They don't shake.” He sounds almost confused. “You're touching me and they don't shake.”
