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“Get out,” I rasped.

Felix halted. “What?”

“Get out,” I said, pulling against the cuffs until the metal rattled. “Go back to your party and your fans because I don’t want your pity.”

“I didn’t stay for the party,” Felix said, reaching for the control panel on the side of the bed. His fingers shook so hard he missed the key on the first try. “I left.”

“Tegula said you were celebrating. He said you moved on.”

“Tegula is a liar.”

Felix punched a code into the panel, initiating the override. The restraints on my chest hissed and released as the metal cuffs around my wrists snapped open.

I sat up too fast and the blood came back into my arms as hot needles. I grabbed Felix by the front of his ruined shirt and yanked him down, slamming his chest against mine to make sure he was real.

“Why are you here?” I demanded. “You won. You’re safe. Why are you down here?”

Felix gripped my forearms with fingers that dug into the skin. “Because he tried to replace you. He brought Helier into the office and told me to partner with him.”

“The Reserve Captain?”

“He told me to let you go and forget you,” Felix whispered, his eyes searching mine, frantic. “I told him no.”

The world tilted on its axis.

“You told the Director no?”

“I told him to go to hell,” Felix said. “I told him I pick my partner, and then I walked out.”

He leaned his forehead against mine. He was burning up, a feverish, manic heat bleeding out of his skin into mine.

“I’m not playing without you, Leander. I’m not being the King of a graveyard.”

The anger drained out of me, replaced by a shock so profound it stole my breath. He had burned his entire life down. He had walked away from the safety of Rank One, from the future he had been groomed for since he was a child, just to come back for me.

“You idiot,” I choked out. “You stupid, fucking arrogant idiot. They’ll kill you.”

He pulled back to cup my face in his hands, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw, and he looked at me like I was the only thing keeping him tethered to earth. He kissed me then, like sealing a promise before he could take it back. I kissed him back like the last hour hadn’t happened, forgetting the cuffs still striped red into my wrists, forgetting Tegula’s hour had probably already run out. Felix pulled back first, breathing hard, forehead dropping to mine one more time before he straightened.

“Can you stand?” he asked.

I looked at my leg. The boot was heavy, and the pain sat far back, dulled by adrenaline, lying to me about what came next. Felix found the clamps and freed the boot from the rig, and together we swung the leg off the bed, his hands under the plastic, my fists in the mattress. Lowering it was the worst thing yet. The rig had kept the blood out of the break, and gravity gave it back all at once, a heat that poured down into the bone and filled it, and I heard the sound I made from somewhere outside my own head. Felix went still and held the boot against his chest until I could breathe again.

“I can stand.”

I could. On one leg, one hand strangling the bed rail, sweat coming up cold across my back. The boot touched the floor and the leg told me once, clearly, what would happen if I asked it for more.

“Good.” Felix turned his back to me and crouched down. “Get on.”

“What?”

“I’m carrying you. We’re leaving.”

“Felix, you can’t carry me. I weigh more than two hundred pounds.”

“I don’t care if you weigh a ton,” he snapped, looking over his shoulder. The ice was back in his eyes, unyielding. “Get on my back, Regillen.”

I hesitated, then I wrapped my arms around his neck. The first lift failed. I fed him my weight in stages and it still arrived all at once; he got halfway up, his knee buckled, and we went back down, the boot clipping the bed frame with a jolt that went up my bone like current. He reset his grip on my thighs, braced one hand on the rail, and drove up through his legs with the sound men make under a loaded bar.