I gave a reedy yelp of surprise as he hefted me easily against his chest, like I weighed barely anything at all. I scrambled to keep the sides of my blanket-cape tight across my front as he crossed the room to the other door. It slammed open without him even reaching out to touch it, and I felt that power in him, felt the lights between his scales heat up and vibrate against my body as he did it.

Thankfully, he hadn’t opened a door into a prison cell or dark basement. It was, despite its alienness, so very clearly a bathroom that I almost burst into tears.

The toilet was a smooth bowl of gold-veined blue rock built into the floor. The alien carried me over there with swift strides, got down on his knees, then helped me into a wobbly crouching position. He remained behind me, hands as solid as rock on my waist, holding me steady as I fought to keep my cape from trailing into the bowl.

“OK, I’m good,” I said, panting slightly, arms quivering from the ordeal of keeping my blanket tight enough so that it covered me but also wouldn’t get drenched by my own pee in the toilet. “You can go now.”

The alien didn’t move.

My cheeks blazed, and my bladder twinged painfully.

“Look, I’m shy, OK? I couldn’t even pee in a public restroom if someone was in the stall beside me back on Earth. So I really just need you to go now.”

Still no movement behind me. No words of response, either.

The alien knew what I unfortunately knew, too – that I’d probably collapse the second he let go.

“How about this?” I asked, wriggling in his hold until I was on my knees straddling the bowl. I kept one hand on my blanket, then placed my other palm flat to the floor in front of the bowl. “See? I won’t fall now. You can let go.”

I lifted my hand to make a shooing motion towards the doorway we’d just come through, then put it back down.

Miraculously, it seemed to have worked. Once my palm was back in place on the stone, the alien removed his hands from me. He did it so painfully slowly, lifting one finger from my body at a time, as if testing my strength with every centimetre he pulled back.

Finally, when he was satisfied I wasn’t going to fall into a puddle of my own piss, he rose and moved away.

The sigh of relief was only halfway up my throat when he resettled himself directly in front of me.

He crouched, elbows on his knees, eye pinned to me.

“I said you can go,” I cried. I was starting to shake with the effort it was taking just to hold myself on my knees. “Go! Like, out of the room!”

His eye narrowed, and he rose again, only to cross to the wall opposite me and lean back against it, his wings curling forward over his shoulders.

“That’s not any better!” I snapped.

He said something in return, but the only thing I caught was my own name punctuating his alien sentence like an annoyed exclamation mark. Then he crossed his arms over his chest again and stared, the physical manifestation of I’ll wait.

“I guess you don’t understand what shy means,” I muttered. The rest of that saying came pinging back to me in my sister’s voice. A brave man gets to eat the soup; a shy man can’t even eat cabbage.

Elvi wouldn’t have made herself suffer kneeling on hard stone and tightening the muscles around her bladder like this. She would have peed, staring alien or not. Hell, she would have pissed right on him if it had suited her purposes.

“What’s so great about soup, anyway?” I said sullenly.

Then, I squeezed my eyes shut, doing my best to pretend I was alone, and peed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Skallagrim

Suvi finally gave up on her ridiculous notion of being left alone in her weakened state and urinated. She did it with her eyes shut and her chin tipped down towards the floor as if silently submitting to defeat. I didn’t like seeing her like that, with her head lowered in hideous unhappiness.

But if she believed for one fleeting fraction of a heartbeat that I was going to leave her in a room alone when she couldn’t even stand up on her own, then she didn’t know me at all.

Perhaps fair, considering how little I knew myself these days.

I shook off the shadow of that thought as the stream of her urine came to a trickling end. Even though she’d now cracked her eyes open, the movements of her right hand were near-blind, feeling along the stone.

“The pull to rinse is behind you,” I said, realizing even as the words left my mouth how pointless it was to try to speak to her. She couldn’t understand me, and blabbering at her was useless. My wings flexed, pushing me bodily away from the wall as I strode around behind her, crouched, and pulled the lever.

Suvi gasped as the stream of water hit the flesh between her legs and simultaneously came down to rinse the bowl clean. Rather mercifully, my view of everything was obscured by the white fabric bunched around her hips. It had been hard enough not to ogle her when I’d righted her flimsy blanket covering back in the other room. Watching a glistening stream of water sluice over the pink skin of her cunt would be an intolerable and unmitigated distraction, and Suvi did not need a man distracted. She needed a man with half a brain left in his head to adequately take care of her. To take care of her the way she deserved.

To take care of her the way I’d failed to until now.

That set my fangs grinding and had my belly going sour, and any foolish lechery related to Suvi’s fever-weakened body vanished.

I ignored the sluggish way she swatted at my hands as they gripped her waist and hauled her up. I was about to lift her entirely against my chest once more when she noticed the stone tub in the corner of the room and, in a voice stronger than I’d heard it in days, nearly feral in its enthusiasm, cried out, “Bah-uth!”

“What?” I grunted, making sure she was alright on her feet but not yet willing to let go. “The tub? You want to bathe?”

I supposed it made sense she’d want to cleanse herself. Jolakaia had wiped her flesh with cotton cloths at various intervals, but even I knew that was not comparable to the delicious swipe of flowing water over scales. Or skin, in her case.

Holding her to me, I leaned to the side, checking through the open door to confirm that the main medical room where the bed was remained empty. Cursed Jolakaia. The more Suvi’s condition improved, the less time my relative spent here. Normally, I neither noticed nor particularly cared. As long as Suvi was sleeping as comfortably as possible it mattered little if Jolakaia was here or not.

But it mattered now. Because Suvi apparently wanted to bathe and I did not need to ask her, did not need to understand her words, to know that she would not want to do it in my presence.

“I can call to the guards outside and make them fetch Jolakaia,” I grumbled, frowning at the empty room beyond us. I wasn’t actually sure whether they’d listen to me or not – they only answered to Koltar – but perhaps being reminded of their broken-limbed comrades in their splints and casts could persuade them to do as I commanded.

Suvi didn’t seem to hear me, or maybe it was that she just didn’t understand me. Her floppy limbs nudged mine, as if through the sheer power of her might she could drag me over to the bath herself.

I thought about refusing her. I really did.

I couldn’t.

Not after how much she’d suffered because of things I’d done and hadn’t done, things I hadn’t known or remembered. She’d been sick and in pain and confined to her bed for more than six days now. If she wanted a cursed bath then by the stars she’d get one.

“You realize I cannot leave you alone,” I said as I picked her up and carried her over to the tub. Leaving her to kneel down and piss on her own was one thing (and already beyond anything I’d be willing to do), leaving her alone in water whose surface her small head could slip silently beneath was quite another.