I kicked off my shoes. Climbed in wearing everything else—jeans, shirt, the borrowed sweater I'd claimed that smelled like his laundry detergent—because the thought of undressing required energy I no longer possessed. The sheets were cool from the empty hours, and I curled onto my side facing the wall, pulling my knees up, making myself compact.
The mattress dipped behind me. Then his arm came around my waist—not tentative this time, not the careful negotiation of boundaries we'd been navigating for weeks. Just solid. Certain. His chest against my back, his chin tucked against my shoulder, his cold seeping through the layers between us in a way that should have made me shiver and instead made something inside me go quiet.
"I can hear you thinking," he murmured against the back of my neck.
"I'm always thinking."
"I know. Try to stop."
"That's not how brains work."
"Humor me."
I closed my eyes. The thoughts didn't stop—they rarely did, not for me, not since childhood when my brain had decided that constant vigilance was the price of survival—but they softened. Blurred at the edges. The list of failures and vulnerabilities and worst-case scenarios that had been scrolling through my head like a ticker tape began to slow, each item losing its sharp edges as the cold at my back seeped deeper. And at some point—the thing we weren't talking about. The enormous thing that Ignatius had said. That Taz's biology had been out of whacksince I arrived. I wanted to ask, but I was frightened this would be one thing I couldn't handle at this moment.
His breathing was slow and even against my neck, each exhale a thin ribbon of cold that traced the ridge of my spine and dissolved into the warmth of the pillow. Not quite human breathing—I knew that now, could catalog the difference the way I cataloged everything, the slightly longer intervals between inhales, the deeper expansion of his lungs, the way his heart rate settled into a rhythm that would have sent any cardiologist reaching for the crash cart.
Forty-two beats per minute. Maybe fewer. I could feel it through his chest, pressed against my back like a metronome set to a tempo the rest of the world didn't recognize.
I should have been terrified. Not of him—that ship had sailed spectacularly when I'd put my hands on a dragon's snout and felt the cold bend around me like a current—but of everything else. The breach. Gavin. The data sitting somewhere out there in the digital ether, a ticking bomb with my fingerprints all over it. Every clinical instinct I had screamed that I should be upright, on the phone, running damage control with the same relentless efficiency I brought to a code blue.
Instead, I lay in the arms of an ice dragon and felt my body surrender to exhaustion one system at a time.
My shoulders went first—the chronic tension I'd carried so long it had become structural, a permanent brace against whatever was coming next. It released in a slow, almost painful unwinding, muscles I'd forgotten I was clenching finally letting go. Then my jaw, which I'd been holding tight enough to crack a molar. Then my hands, which uncurled from the fists I hadn't realized I was making, fingers going slack against the mattress.
Taz's arm tightened fractionally around my waist. Not pulling. Just adjusting. Like he could feel me coming apart and wanted to make sure all the pieces stayed in the same place.
"You're still thinking," he murmured.
"I'm thinking quieter."
"Progress."
His thumb found the strip of skin between my shirt and my jeans—an accidental gap, or maybe not accidental at all—and traced a slow line back and forth. The cold of it was exquisite. Not sharp, not painful, just a clean, bright sensation that cut through the fog of exhaustion and guilt and gave me something immediate to focus on. A single point of contact. A single truth.
He was here. I was here. The rest could wait.
"When I was in nursing school," I said, and I didn't know why I was saying it except that the dark and the quiet and the steady cold at my back made it feel like a confessional, "they taught us about triage. How to look at a room full of people in crisis and decide who needed help first. Who could wait. Who couldn't be saved."
His thumb paused. Then resumed.
"I was good at it. I was always good at it. The instructors said I had an unusual capacity for detachment—they meant it as a compliment, but it always felt like a diagnosis. Like they were saying, 'You're good at this because something in you is already broken. You've already learned how to look at suffering and not drown in it.'"
Taz didn't say anything. He didn't need to. His breathing stayed steady against my neck, and his thumb kept moving—back and forth, back and forth—and the rhythm of it became a kind of permission. To keep talking. To say the things I'd never said to anyone because no one had ever held still long enough to hear them.
"The thing they don't teach you," I continued, my voice dropping to something barely above a whisper, "is that the detachment isn't real. It's performance. You stand at the bedside and you speak in calm, measured tones and you make decisionsthat save lives, and the whole time there's a version of you somewhere behind your sternum that's screaming. That sees every patient as someone's person. Someone's whole world. And you triage them anyway, because that's the job, and if you stop to feel it, people die." I felt his arm tighten around me—not a response to the words, exactly, but to the silence that came after them. The silence where the screaming lived.
"You're not broken," he said. His voice was low and rough and certain, the way he said everything that mattered. "You're the opposite of broken. You built yourself into someone who could hold other people's worst moments without flinching, and you did it alone, and the cost of that is something no one ever bothered to count."
My breath shuddered out of me. I pressed my face into the pillow, and his cold mouth found the knob of my spine just above my collar, and the kiss he left there was so careful it undid me more completely than anything desperate could have.
"I'm counting now," he whispered against my skin.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. But I reached down and laced my fingers through his where they rested against my stomach, and I held on the way I'd held on to every patient, every chart, every impossible night shift—with everything I had left.
His cold seeped into my knuckles. My warmth seeped into his.
And somewhere between one breath and the next, I was asleep.