Page 85 of Rejected Hollow

“Buenos días, reina. You’re in my shirt. I’ve had worse mornings.”

“What happened to you?”

“Fell down the stairs.”

I stared at the marks on his side. “You fell down the stairs onto a tiger?”

The grin faltered, although only for a second.

I pressed my fingertips carefully along his lower ribs, checking each one the way I would examine an animal that couldn’t tell me exactly where it hurt. When I reached the third rib from the bottom, all the color drained from his face and he sucked air through his teeth.

“Cracked,” I said. “At least two. Maybe three.”

My voice stayed level and clinical even though nothing inside me felt remotely calm. The bruise covered nearly half his side, and there was no possible way those four curved marks had come from a staircase. Something with claws had struck him hard enough to break bone, and afterward he had come back here and slept on the floor beside my bed instead of getting help.

“You need the infirmary,” I said. “You need pain relief, something cold on the bruising, and about six weeks without doing whatever the hell you did last night.”

“Can’t do the infirmary. Can’t do the six weeks.”

The fear inside me turned into anger so quickly that I almost welcomed it. Anger was easier to deal with. If I was angry, I didn’t have to think about how much worse this could have been, or how easily I might have woken up alone in his bed without ever knowing why he hadn’t come back.

“Jax—”

“Please don’t ask, reina.”

He said it quietly, looking up at me from the floor, and this time there was no grin at all. Without it, I saw the same expression I had caught for barely a second in the Pit on my first day. He looked exhausted, his face stripped of all the easy charm he usually hid behind.

“Please,” he said. “I know how this looks. And I’ll explain. I promise. I just can’t do it yet.”

I wanted a name. I wanted to know who had done this to him, where they were now, and whether they intended to come back and finish what they had started. More than anything, I wanted to drag him straight to the infirmary and make his injuries somebody else’s responsibility, because the thought that I might miss something serious while he smiled and joked his way around it made my throat tighten.

But whatever he was hiding, he was afraid of it. That much was obvious.

“Not yet,” I said. “But you promised.”

“I promised.”

I helped him sit upright, moving slowly enough that he had time to tell me if anything hurt worse, and then I made him take three deep breaths while I watched both sides of his chest rise. He swore through every one of them. His breathing was shallow but even, and when I made him cough, there was no blood.

None of that meant he was safe. A small pneumothorax, a bruised lung, or a slow internal bleed could still be hiding beneath the obvious injuries. All I had established was that he wasn’t visibly deteriorating in front of me.

I counted every breath anyway.

“If anything changes,” I said, “if you get short of breath, dizzy, feverish, or cough up so much as a pink speck, I don’t care what secret you’re protecting. I’m taking you to the infirmary.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I soaked a clean cloth in cold water and held it carefully against the worst of the bruising. My hands stayed steady because they always did when something was hurt, even when the rest of me couldn’t seem to manage the same trick.

When I finished, he caught one of my hands and pressed it flat against his chest over his heart. It was beating hard beneath my palm.

He was alive. He was here. Whatever had happened last night, he had made it back.

“You’re very good at that,” he said.

“I’m a vet tech. You’re a very big cat.”

He laughed, then immediately regretted it. I hated the sharp catch in his breathing, even as the sound of his laugh eased some of the pressure that had been sitting inside my chest.