#evisceration

Gray adjusted Kiera’s head on the pillow, smoothing back strands of sweat-soaked brown hair from her feverish forehead. The hero was panting, her every breath spilling another trickle of blood onto the white covers, but he couldn’t care less about the material.

“Kiera, don’t close your eyes, damn it!” He reached for her chin, tapping his thumb gently on her cheek, and those bright silver-blue eyes fluttered open again, the whites bloodshot; she was so clearly exhausted, but he’d seen enough to know that if she fell asleep now, she wouldn’t wake up. “Stay with me, Kiera. Breathe, and focus on my face. Tell me about the battle.” His earlier question—who did this to you?—was still circling in his mind, but such terror had crossed her features when he’d asked it that Gray thought it would be better to stay away from the question for now.

“The battle—” she coughed, then gasped as the motion spread agony up her core, “—wasn’t so much a battle as a massacre.” She was wheezing, but he preferred it to her silence, eerily close to death. Still listening, Gray reached for her suit, where she was still slamming down pressure despite the horrendous pain it must have been causing her, and reached for the gauze in his medkit, ready to pile it on top of the wound.

The sight that found him when he lifted her hands, however, knocked the breath from his lungs. A curse escaped his lips, earning him Kiera’s surprised glance.

“It’s not that bad,” she began weakly, clearly lying. Before she could spin some more bullshit, he shook his head and pinned her with a glance.

“The battle, Kiera. Tell me about the battle while I fix you up.” Phaedra was coming soon—it had taken the press of a single button to send her the emergency signal, and she was known around this part of town for being quick at her job. While he waited for the medic, he could at least try to keep the hero in his house from bleeding out; the fact that her agony was suppressing his rage with worry didn’t hurt, either.

“I…I don’t know what happened,” Kiera said slowly, breathing shakily. Despite his earlier instructions for her to not look at the wound he was now revealing, he couldn’t rip her gaze away, he knew that much about her stubbornness. Gray adjusted the gauze on her abdomen and pushed down more pressure on the wound.

Kiera screamed, convulsing, and his free hand found hers, squeezing, conveying the apology he wasn’t sure he could put into words. He would rather apologize for this than watch her die, even if the pain in her eyes also held some flicker of—betrayal.

Had she really begun to trust him so easily?

Did she know how little he deserved that trust?

The front door clicked open and slammed closed, causing Kiera to flinch, but Gray didn’t take his eyes off her face as he felt Phaedra’s presence appear at his back, calm and precise even as she took in the scene.

“What the hell is this, Gr—” She stopped herself, breath catching as she registered the identity of the woman bleeding out on the sheets. Her eyes flicked to his, questions sparking, but he ignored them. For once, he ignored her.

“She’s hurt, and I need your help.” He didn’t dare reveal Phaedra’s name to Kiera; it was one thing to put his own identity in jeopardy, but he wouldn’t risk the healer for his own crazy actions.

Phaedra set her bag on the floor at the side of the bed, adjusting the medical mask covering half her face. A flick of her fingers, and the civilian’s clothes she was wearing disappeared, replaced by a doctor’s scrubs. Her dark hair was already coiled into a bun, but even that was smoothed back tighter, covered by a net in the span of a few seconds.

“What’s the issue?”

“Her abdomen has been eviscerated, and the rest of her body is covered in lacerations.” Gray pushed down on the wound again, harder, and a gasp escaped the hero, her eyes glued to his face as the betrayal eased into something like understanding. Appreciation?

Whatever it was, anger and fear sparked under it.

Phaedra ignored the tension between the hero and the villain, gathering more gauze in her gloved hands and replacing the already-bloody cloth under Gray’s hand efficiently. Her eyes were pinched in concentration, but he saw fear there, too. Fear of what this hero would do when she went back to her team and told them everything.

Gray had been pushing his own thoughts of the future away, but seeing them reflected in the healer’s eyes made them harder to ignore, especially when Kiera was still looking at him as if he’d just slaughtered a village of innocents.

He squeezed her hand tighter, willing her to continue her account of the battle, but her palm was all but limp in his hold, her body slumping even as Phaedra had begun to heal her with magic and medicine, treating the wound so clinically that even Gray had a hard time looking at it, fully exposed.

“Kiera!” Gray snapped, reaching for her face again, trying to rouse her from the exhaustion marring her features. “Kiera, look at me. Stay with me, alright? Don’t fall asleep on me.”

“Wake her up, Gray,” Phaedra ordered, terse. Her hands weren’t shaking, she was too well-trained to let them, but the rest of her body was shuddering faintly. “Don’t let her fall asleep, because even I won’t be able to help her if she does.”

“Stay with me, Kiera,” he said again, and his heart nearly skipped a beat as her silver-blue eyes fluttered open again, lined with tears. Tears.

“It hurts,” she whispered. Her gaze was no longer on the wound, but on the ceiling, blank and full of emotion all at once.

“I know, Kiera. I know. Just stay with me. Stay with me.”

He wiped the tears from her face, feeling Phaedra’s magic pulse erratically as she closed the wound painstakingly, fighting infection and taking out the shards of metal stuck in Kiera’s body. Knitting together flesh that was so mangled she had no more magic to also relieve the pain.

Kiera’s hand tightened on his own, holding on as if he was her only anchor to life.

I can’t let her die.

“Stay with me, Kiera. Just stay with me.”

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