Chapter 10

I need something stronger.” Harry was fury and condescension and pain, and there was a real chance that he was plotting my demise.

I fixed him with a stare. “You need to let me work.” I’d given him the maximum dose of the over-the-counter pain meds, but we were almost out. Something stronger wasn’t an option.

I continued to tend his burns. Strips of cloth, soaked in cool water, laid over his collarbone and arms. The silver cream and gauze were going to be next, and we were running low on those, too.

“It feels like I’m being flayed alive.” He gritted his teeth.

I knew from having been down this road with him before: The pain was going to get worse before it got better. I worked in silence for a minute or two, and then—

“Everything hurts.” His voice was more animal than human. I worried that I might need Jackson to hold him still, to keep him from doing himself and his injuries irreparable harm—but then my patient’s eyes made their way to mine, and his body settled.

Instead of noticing the color of his irises this time, I noticed the clarity in his gaze, the way it searched mine, like I was the patient, and he was something else altogether.

“Doesn’t it?” he murmured. Everything hurts. Doesn’t it?

My chest seized, the question trapping stale air in my lungs, because he was right. Everything hurt. That was why I was here. It was what I was hiding from.

Kaylie.

“You don’t get to ask me questions,” I said, and I was surprised at how animal my voice sounded. I was a person who’d learned from childhood to hide my emotions, to make myself small—but I couldn’t hide this.

I hated him, and I was saving him, and the only way I could even remotely justify that was by hating him some more.

Keep going. Do the work. Gentle now. For a while, there was blessed silence.

His eyes closed. “You build little castles out of sugar packets.”

I pretended I couldn’t hear him—but I did. I definitely did.

“It’s endearing, really. The sugar castles.” A twist of his lips made it impossible for me to tell if that was sarcasm or if he meant it. “Do you believe in fairy tales, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?”

There it was again—that name. Was he really so obsessed with palindromes?

I opened the jar of silver cream. “I believe in villains,” I said flatly.

“Villains.” He made a huffing sound, pain etched so clearly into the lines of his face—cheekbones, brow, jaw—that I couldn’t look away. “It’s funny,” he continued. “I don’t remember a damn thing about myself, but I would drink to that.”

I bet you would. There was a good chance that when he’d said that he needed something stronger, he might not have just been talking about the pain. Pills and booze. He’d shown no signs of chills or seizures, so I didn’t think he was in full-on withdrawal, not physically at least.

“The only thing you’re drinking,” I told him, steel in my voice, “is water.”

If that made me his villain… good.