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“You need to…” I didn’t need to finish as he had other ideas that didn’t involve his sleeve. Instead, he reached back over his own shoulders, pulled the shirt off in one swift movement and dropped it on the bed beside him.

This was when I forgot how to breathe.

“That… that was not necessary,” I said but it came out slightly strangled, and the reason it came out slightly strangled was sitting three feet in front of me with its forearms braced on its knees.

Of course, I had seen him without a shirt before, but it wasn’t remotely the same thing as being ready for it.

Jesus H Christ, the guy was ripped. As in every single inch of him, because there was not a shred of fat to be found. I had thought he was huge back then, but this… this was something else. Because whatever he had been doing with his time at Ashlock, I was now looking at every single hour of it.

Everything about him had gone harder. The chest, the stomach, the heavy slabs of his shoulders, the veins standing up along the insides of his forearms, and all of it shifting under the ink whenever he so much as breathed.

And the warrior was still there. Kneeling on his chest with his head bowed and the sword held point-down at his own heart. Its wings were running up the side of that throat, and the demons pouring off his ribs like smoke as though they were coming out of him to get at it.

I stood there with a blood pressure cuff hanging out of my hand and my mouth slightly open as I forgot, for several long seconds, what my job was.

And he watched me do it. But of course, he did.

“Something the matter, little nurse?” he asked, and he was clearly enjoying himself immensely.

“N-no,” I stuttered, trying to tear my eyes away from the sight of all that raw power, as if it were coiled, waiting for a chance to strike.

And that was when I saw it.

A scar on the outside of his right forearm, running down toward the wrist. It wasn’t the one I had treated but a new one, running alongside it. Whoever had stitched it had done it in a hurry, and I could think of only one pair of hands at Ashlock that would have been shaking that badly while they did.

I had my fingers on it before I had decided anything at all.

“What happened here?”

Everything in the room seemed to change temperature and I didn’t understand why until he replied.

“I didn’t have my little nurse to patch me up,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a lower timbre, enough that I knew to be wary of it.

I took my hand back.

“Was this another self-inflicted wound?” I asked, unsure why I wanted to know.

“You could call it that,” he answered cryptically.

“What would you call it?”

He looked at me for a long moment before he answered, and I watched him decide how much of the truth to give me.

“Self-inflicted rage,” he said, and the honesty of it shocked me more than the answer did. But he didn’t explain it and I knew better than to push for more. Because I got the impression that it had something to do with me, and I didn’t know how I felt about that.

So, I put the cuff on him.

I got it around his upper arm and it very nearly didn’t fit. His bicep was that thick. I pumped it up, and I put my stethoscope in my ears and got the bell into the crook of his elbow. Then for about forty seconds neither of us said anything at all.

“One eighteen over seventy-two,” I muttered, and I nearly laughed when he asked,

“Is that good?”

“It is irritatingly good,” I sighed and he chuckled at that. A sound I felt go through his arm under my hand. I looked very hard at the dial and pretended I hadn’t been affected at all.

His pulse was next, so I put two fingers on the inside of his wrist, and I found it right away because it was strong just like the rest of him. But I did notice the way he reacted to my touch. It wasn’t quite a flinch but more like a slight shiver. Then I counted as if I hadn’t noticed and when I didn’t believe the number, I counted it again.

Fifty-two.