He’d never known why the former Ofarian Board had matched them in marriage in the first place. Him from the working class, she from the ruling. Kelsey hadn’t wanted it—she’d never loved anything more than her career—so when the Board had been deposed three months ago and the old systems crumbled, David couldn’t bear to hold her to a promise she hadn’t willfully given.
So he’d ended it. For her sake.
Kelsey opened cabinets and removed rolls of gauze, scissors, and a clear pouch of water that sparkled like the sun setting over a lake.
“Did you get Wes?” she asked, turning to him.
The reminder of his most recent failure hurt almost as bad as his injuries. “No. He got away.” David touched his sticky forehead and groaned. “A steep ravine and a sharp boulder got me instead.”
Wes Pritchart, the last former Ofarian executive remaining to be tried and imprisoned, had been on the lam since the Board fell. He’d been chief operating officer of the Plant, which had secretly manufactured Mendacia, the magic product that had kept the Ofarians steeped in wealth and privilege for generations. Then the shocking secret behind Mendacia had come to light, setting their society on a path to destruction. David was proud to say he’d been among the treasonous few to have taken down the Ofarian Board. Its members and anyone knowingly involved in the Plant had been imprisoned. Everyone except Wes, who’d managed to escape.
Kelsey came to the edge of the exam table and peered at his temple, her expression assessing and professional. “Can you lean back for me? Yeah, thanks. Just relax.”
When her latex-covered fingers touched his face, he inadvertently sighed. Their first touch in nearly six months, since the night of their matching ceremony. They’d held hands then, as a ribbon of glistening, enchanted water had bound them together.
The sting of the antiseptic wash didn’t faze him. Over the sharp tang of the medicine, he could smell her. Feel her.
“This’ll need some stitches,” she said in that low, careful way of doctors, “but I’ve been working on something new. Secondary water magic combined with Primary medicine. If I’m right, it could be . . . monumental. Do I have your permission?”
She was bending over him, her voice a caress to match the lightness of her touch. Her sky blue eyes shone like stars, and he knew it had to come from the excitement of her work, not from his proximity.
“Do it, Doc. Whatever you want.” He wasn’t entirely sure of the innocence of his command.
Kelsey lifted the glimmering pouch over his head wound and slit a corner. Words in the language of their birth poured out in time with the liquid. The sparkling water defied gravity to undulate in a cool bubble the size of a golf ball over his split skin. She whispered more Ofarian words, tapping into the magic swirling inside the bubble, and sent it surging into his body. Her words, her power, drifted inside him. Slipped into his bloodstream, his very being.
There was something else, too—the numbness of Primary medicine doing its thing alongside the Secondary magic. Monumental, she’d said.
“How does it feel?” she asked.
“Good.”
Holy hell, it did. The quiet pulse of magic traveled down his arms and torso. Lower even, stirring him. He shifted on the table, trying to hide the neon sign that would tell her his body was lighting up. He’d successfully hidden his desire for twelve years. He wasn’t about to show her now, here on her table, when he knew he wasn’t wanted.
“That should do it. The combo should accelerate healing.”
In Ofarian, she commanded the bubble to roll off his temple and into her palm. No longer sparkling—the magic and medicine transferred into him—she carried it, whole and wobbly, to the sink, where it splashed into the stainless steel basin. As she came back to him, she murmured clinical approval, numbed his temple, and started to stitch.
He relaxed into her touch, feeling the tug of the needle but not the pain, and let his eyes trail out the door to the flurry of nurses and lab technicians outside. “This is great, Doc, what you’ve built here.”
“Thank you.” Pride swelled her voice.
“So this is what you’ve been doing lately? Experimenting with mixed treatments?”
“Yes.” Her hands left him and he gazed up at her. Damn, she was like the sun, her pale skin and coppery hair dazzling.
“Can I tell you something?” she asked, sitting back.
Anything. Please let it be what he wanted to hear. “Sure,” he said.
“I was thinking that maybe, if my combined treatments work on Ofarians, they might work on Primaries, too.”
Such an amazing thought. Such a dangerous thought. Right now, the Primary and Secondary human worlds—the former ignorant of magic, the latter dependent on it—didn’t overlap. For Ofarians to reveal themselves as magic-users could be devastating. It had been one of the key issues behind the Board’s destruction. But if Kelsey could actually help the Primaries, if her work could heal them . . . that could be quite the game changer. Or the world changer.
“Gwen and Griffin do want to better integrate into the Primary society,” he said carefully. “Who knows? Maybe it’ll happen.”
“Thank you. For saying that. I worry about not being able to keep this place open, now that . . .”
The Ofarians don’t have Mendacia, David mentally finished for her. Millions and millions of dollars had once poured in from that product, now all gone.
“Did you know,” she said, returning to her work, “that the Board used to have access to all medical records? They had no concept of sanctity, of doctor-patient privilege. But here, all my work is confidential. I love that.”
The Board had destroyed so much—and invaded even more—under the banner of “success.” Griffin Aames, the first elected Ofarian leader, and Gwen Carroway, the woman who’d taken down the Board, wanted to build back up in the name of progress. David wanted whatever his new leader wanted because Griffin was fair and strong. Even though David was a soldier by birth, he remained in service by choice, and because Griffin was his best friend.
Kelsey cleared her throat, snipped off the thread. “Okay. On to the next. I want your shirt off.”
If she weren’t so professional, so frustratingly poised, he might have taken that statement another way. He wanted to take it another way. Instead, he reached for the buttons on his Ofarian-issued black shirt but couldn’t disguise his wince. Pain streaked from his chest to his fingertips and his arms flopped back to the table.
“It’s okay, you know.” She held up the scissors. “You can say it hurts.”
David looked into her impossibly clear eyes, surrounded by feathers of copper lashes, and laughed. “Then it hurts. Like a bitch.”
But not as much as having to let her go.
She stretched for where the bloodied and shredded shirt was tucked into his black pants. He tortured himself by dreaming she reached for something else.
Though her hands were smooth with latex gloves, he imagined how she might trail her gentle fingers down his ribs, over his belly, and slide beneath the gap of his pants between his hipbones. Only the pain rippling across his chest kept him from getting hard.
She snipped the shirt up one side of the buttons. Tilting him on his side, she cut up the back of the shirt and pulled the two halves down his arms. Habit and his favorite defense mechanism longed to make a joke about his near nakedness, but she looked so serious, and there was only so much forced levity he could stand before it threatened to crush him.