I nod.
“Come.” He takes my hand to help me up. “Let’s rinse your legs off in the bath.”
He lifts me inside the tub and makes me sit on the edge while the water runs warm. Using the nozzle, he rinses the blood from my knees. The water stings. Every so often, he lifts his gaze to my face, measuring my reaction.
When the blood is gone, he grabs a pair of tweezers from the kit. “This is going to hurt.”
I bite my lip. My pain threshold is high, but it’s the weak fluttering of my heart that worries me. I’m starting to get that out-of-breath feeling, which is never a good sign.
He pulls out a thick piece of glass. The burn makes me gasp.
“Sorry,” he says, giving me another pained look.
“It’s okay.”
Piece by piece, he removes the shards. He rinses away the fresh blood, pulls me up, and helps me out of the bath.
“My pills,” I say, feeling lightheaded.
I don’t have to elaborate. He knows what I need.
“Stay here,” he says, giving me an examining look before he moves to the door.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. My hair is matted and my face streaked with red. My white cotton bra and upper body are smeared with blood. I’m a mess. The vision shocks me. I’m trembling when Ian steps back into the bathroom with my pills in his palm and a glass of water in the other hand.
“Thank you,” I say, taking the pills and swallowing them with the water.
He says nothing. He waits until I’ve finished the water to take the glass and leave it on the vanity. After stripping my underwear, he runs a shower. He doesn’t put my clothes in the washing basket. He rolls everything into a bundle and dumps it in the trashcan.
The same thought goes through our minds, because he says, “Don’t worry. Banga doesn’t have blood transmissible infections. I have my staff tested on a regular basis.”
I suppose the bloodstains won’t come out. Anyway, the jeans are torn on the knees.
“I’ll get you new clothes,” he says. “Pretty clothes, like you deserve.”
Clothes are the least of my worries. In the bigger scheme of things, clothes are trivial. “Can you get me a new heart?”
He stills. So do I. I didn’t mean to blurt that out. It has nothing to do with my physical heart and everything with emotions, and the guilty look on his face says he knows it. The pity in his brown eyes hurts me more than the fact that he doesn’t answer.
Chapter 14
Ian
Cas just told me I broke her heart, and I don’t have a comeback. We both know she wasn’t referring to her medical condition. She never complains about the weak heart she’s been born with. She lives with it like animals live with their injuries, accepting the shitty and unfair part of life without making a fuss. That’s why I respect animals a lot more than people, but fuck, Cas is at the top of my admiration list.
She could’ve been dead. Both she and Banga would’ve been dead if she didn’t know how to fire a gun. The thought shakes me. The notion turns my world upside down, because if I lose her, it would kill me. We’d been tracking that baboon for days, and when Garai lost all trace of it the day before yesterday, we thought it had found a remote place to die. The old male had been challenged by a new alpha and cast out as the weaker of the two. He’d carried on alone for a bit, living in isolation, but eventually he’d gone rabid.
Imagining her facing that animal alone is a dark place I can’t go. Seeing her standing on the bath rug covered in blood with her knees cut up wakes every protective instinct I own. When the water in the shower runs warm, I remove my clothes and help her into the stall. I use the nozzle to rinse down her body before lathering her with soap and washing her hair. I inspect every inch of her skin. Her shoulders are sunburnt and her palms sport some nasty blisters. There’s a thick splinter under the skin of her right hand. She groans when I gently massage her back to ease some of the tension.
The water runs cool before I turn it off and wrap her up in a big towel. I make sure she’s dry and the water squeezed out of her hair so she won’t be cold when I dress her in my robe. Next, I attend to the blisters and the splinter.
With the task of bandaging her hands done, I pull the robe down her shoulders and rub after-sun lotion into her skin. Scooping her up into my arms, I hug her to my chest as I carry her to the bedroom. After lowering her onto the sofa, I take just enough time to pull on a pair of boxers before getting her hairbrush to brush out her hair.