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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Kiera woke up to a pounding headache clanging through her mind. 

Well, she hadn’t really been fully asleep, but she wasn’t a vampire; semantics were hardly her thing.

The pain had been with her all night long, thrumming through her head like a storm of rippling waves, ebbing and flowing, easing, softening, increasing, but it never disappeared. Now, as she squinted at the window to her right through lashes that had dried blood clinging to them, her migraine returned full-throttle, slamming into her skull like it had something to prove.

She lifted a hand to scrub the soreness from her eyes, but it was jerked back painfully before she could register exactly what her surroundings were, and a thin silver chain jingled as she flinched, only ripping open another ache in her shoulder.

What in the hell…?

Kiera turned her upper body, squinting even more as she met the sunlight streaming in head-on—where were her damn glasses?—and felt her heart freeze up as she beheld the source of the sound from before.

Not just a chain.

A chain connected to her. 

Shackled at her wrist, the metal warm from her own body heat.

Attached to the bedpost.

She was chained to the bed.

Restrained from moving off of its crisp covers.

Her mouth fell open in shock, and Kiera tried to form words, to even try justifying this to herself, explaining it, but all she knew was that she’d nearly bled out on the infamous Graywing’s doorstep, there had been pain, a dulcet voice, and now she was chained in what she could only hope was the guest bedroom of Gray’s house.

Although she didn’t really know if thinking of him as ‘Gray’ was fair, considering he’d locked her in place while she’d been vulnerable and alone.

At least it meant she’d slept for some interval of time?

“You can’t be serious,” she told herself. “This is not the time to be an optimist, Kiera.”

Looking back to the bedpost—polished, dark wood, at least five inches thick, maybe six—Kiera twisted the ring closed around it, but it had no latch, key, or seam. Like those magic tricks with stainless steel rings that interconnected and broke apart as if they were fantasy creations in a magician’s hands, enchanted with luck or illusion, except this wasn’t a magic trick. This was Kiera’s life, and her chain was not magic or fake. It was real as everything else.

She felt panic rise up as the realization hit her, the reality that this wasn’t a joke or an illusion. It drowned her organs, climbing from her belly to her throat in a matter of seconds, choking her quiet words away and blurring her vision.

Kiera felt her chest start to burn, the place where her heart was beating too quickly against her ribcage like a war drum. Her vision was swimming—when had that started?—and the fingers she’d clenched around the chain were shaking, rattling the metal so fiercely that it broke through Kiera’s heaving gasps.

Footsteps, clear and nimble, ripped her out of the haze, and Kiera’s heart doubled its speed as an almost-familiar figure cut through her still-blurry vision, dressed in a healer’s robes stitched with white. The fabric itself was black—villain.

She shifted back until her spine hit the headboard, the chain growing loose as she inched closer to the post, and a tenor voice she knew she’d never heard said in a half-sigh, “There’s no need to do that, Miss Hawthorne. Or do you prefer Starlight? It’s an adorable little moniker.”

“I would prefer it,” Kiera gritted out through her still-trouble vision, knowing for certain now that this was not the healer Gray—no, Graywing, damn it—had called last night to help her, “If you released me from this chain.”

The woman, still standing at the foot of the bed, shook her head, looking pleased with the fact that she could. 

She smirked, cocking a hip. “The chain is there for safety, yours and everyone else’s, Miss Hawthorne.” 

You think you’re finally getting power over a hero? Oh, yes, it must feel riveting to know you’ve got a half-dead woman chained to a bed. Safety, my ass. Kiera almost said the words when the statement rocked into her fully. Everyone else’s?

She swallowed, debating if weakness was something she was willing to display.

Curiosity—fear—won out. “What do you mean, everyone else’s?” Her mouth suddenly felt too dry, and she managed to rasp the question out. Clearing her throat, Kiera added, “Who else is here?”

The woman didn’t respond, but her lips quirked up sadistically, and footsteps echoed in the hall outside, tunneling a pit of anxiety in Kiera’s stomach. As they approached the door, she braced herself for the worst—and was not disappointed.

Gray strode into the room in a storm of dark fabric, and she felt her stomach bottom out entirely when he met her gaze with his cold, calculating eyes. Every ounce of empathy, worry, compassion, was gone from his face, replaced by the cold mask of his true identity.

“Kiera,” he said shortly, crossing his arms as he came to stand at the woman’s side. He was a head taller, but she deferred to him in the way a high-ranking citizen deferred to a soldier: with the knowledge that she had her own field and he had his, and that right now, he had the lead, but she was no subordinate. “There’s no need to act like an animal.”

Kiera flinched, as much out of fear as for show, and the chain rattled. “Then don’t treat me like one.”

Please, she thought. You’re my only hope. Her magic was still drained from the battle and near-death experience; even if it hadn’t been, she was sure there were wards spanning every inch of the place. Gray’s momentary softness for her—the worry she knew begged the heavens hadn’t been faked—was her only chance at salvation in this clearly dangerous situation, slim as it was.

“You’ll be released when you can demonstrate your trustworthiness, Miss Hawthorne,” the woman cut in coldly. Her ice-chip eyes were fixed on Kiera’s abdomen, the place where a metal rod had eviscerated her now bandaged and half-covered by the loose black t-shirt someone had changed her into—don’t focus on that thought.

“I don’t have to prove anything  to you,” she snarled, barely getting the words out. “Let me go!”

“Do you need to be sedated, Kiera?” Graywing stepped closer, his golden-green eyes catching the light. They were the worst things she’d ever seen. The ugliest, most horrendous gaze she ever met, because unlike every other villain’s eyes, these reflected Kiera’s own face, betrayal etched into her features with a reverent hand.

She tore her gaze away from his eyes and jerked closer, nearly wrenching her shoulder out of its socket. Her free hand caught the edge of his shirt, black and soft like silk. “Please, Gray—”

“Sedate her!”

The woman snarled the order as Graywing ripped himself away, and a cacophony of booted steps slammed into Kiera’s ears, defeating her. When darkness ripped its claws into her flesh and drew nothing but pain, the ringing silence was broken by a single thought—

I have nothing to prove.

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