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“What is it?”

Her voice came out even. She heard it and did not trust it.

“It has stopped.” He said it simply, the way he had said everything all night, but he did not go on at once. He pressed the pad of one blunt thumb near the wound and watched. “A cut like this, in a big man, it weeps for hours. This one …” He turned the cloth to show her. A smear. Hardly more than a shaving nick would give. “It stopped while I was tying the fourth knot.”

“Is that not good?”

“It is not usual.”

Her eyes went to Damian’s face.

He looked worse.

That was the impossible thing. The wound beneath Luc’s hands was improving while the man attached to it seemed to be disappearing. The little color he had possessed was gone. His mouth had lost even its gray-pink cast. His breathing was so shallow she had to watch his chest to be certain of it.

“Luc.”

He followed her gaze.

For the first time that night, his hands stopped.

“What is happening to him?”

Luc put two fingers against Damian’s throat.

Ophelia waited.

“He is alive.”

“I know he is alive.”

“He is working.”

She stared at him.

Luc stared down at the wound. “The body. It is working.”

And he bent back to it, because whatever it was, the work was the work.

She watched after that. She could not help watching. And so she saw it before he said anything more. The first stitches, the ones he had set at the lower end, no longer bridged raw red flesh at all. The edges beneath them had drawn together on their own. The angry gape had become a seam. The seam was already going pale at its margins, a ridged, shining pink, the color a wound turned after days.

Not hours.

Minutes.

While she held a lamp over it, her husband’s body was doing a week’s healing between one knot and the next, the way another man might draw a breath.

And with every impossible inch it repaired, Damian seemed to sink farther from her.

Her fingers, still pressed to the edges of it, felt the change before her mind would take it. Less give. Less heat. The flesh closing under her own skin as if it had never asked her to hold it.

“Is it killing him?”

Luc looked sharply at her.

“The healing?”

For a moment he said nothing. Then he shook his head.