“Scarlett,” he cut me off, grinding my name between his teeth. “For once in your fucking life, listen to me.”
The bite in his tone clipped away anything else I had to say, disintegrating it to dust that irritated my already sore throat. I blinked up at him, at his eyes that assessed everywhere over my body and nowhere on my face. They were eclipsed of their usual beauty as he checked my body for cuts and breaks.
He ran his hands along my legs, skipping over the bloody mess of my knees to cup my ankles. He rolled my left and waited for a reaction of pain. Then, he rolled my right and only got halfway through before a hiss sucked back through my teeth when an ache twinged up my foot.
Agent Reyes’ nostrils flared at my pain.
“Lay down.”
And I did. The dominance in his voice pushed at my chest until my back touched dirt. Twigs dug into my side, bending and snapping beneath my weight, and a narrow stone wedged underneath my shoulder blade as I laid back.
“Ahh.” Pain bit all along my shoulder and chewed across my back with razored teeth at the presence of the stone, and my vocalized discomfort drew the brewing storm’s stare.
“What hurts?”
“Shoulder,” I grit out, pinching the sun’s glare between my eyes as I squeezed them shut. Behind my eyes, it was just a blinding dot, and it skipped all along my eyelids, skewing my focus away from the fingers that dragged along my pained shoulder.
“It’s dislocated.”
Sucking back a sharp breath, I replied, “Well that fucking tracks.”
“I’ll have to pop it back in place, and it will hurt.”
By now, everything was growing darker, and every second was more nauseating than the last. At this point, more pain was a welcomed point of focus.
“Bring it on.”
Agent Reyes gathered me up in his arms so I was sitting up at the waist and held my chest against his. My fucked up arm laid limply at my side with Reyes’ hand a hovering presence behind my shoulder.
Shallow breaths punctured my lungs on repeat, and I buried my head into Reyes’ neck that was right there offering a crook of comfort. I closed my eyes shut against him, breathing in the woods off of his skin.
He smelled like sandalwood and like the air on the coldest winter night combined. Crisp, rich, and faintly sweet, and I filled my chest with him and held it in.
The rough brush of his beard grazed my cheek, soft notes of his voice riding the tip of my ear.
“Scarlett…”
I shivered without meaning to and pressed my face into him harder. His hovering hand whispered along my injured shoulder just as his mouth brushed my skin, warm lips an unexpected caress against my neck.
“Breathe,” he murmured gently.
And I did, expanding my lungs with air to—
“Fuck!”
Pain cracked inside my back, exploding shock waves of searing white through my body like heat lightning. All of me cringed. All of me hurt. All of me wanted to fucking die.
Reyes pushed his hand that had just jammed my shoulder back into socket to the nape of my neck, holding me against him as I howled in torment.
My opened mouth clamped down on the thing closest to me, needing something to fucking chew into to make it through the pain. A growl vibrated in Agent Reyes' chest, but he didn’t tell me to stop as I bit into him, teeth sinking into his flesh through the agony.
Tears sprung to my eyes, leaking down my face to be swallowed by the fabric of his shirt. I whimpered my pain into the slope of his neck through bared teeth and waited as it slowly subsided to something throbbing but bearable.
Reyes sucked down an inhale of relief as I relinquished my mouth from his muscles, slowly drawing back from him with labored breaths working my lungs. Black dots scribbled in to frame my vision during the worst of the pain, but every second and every blink, they lessened and vanished, as did the dizziness.
After another minute, all that was left was the throbbing and enlivened adrenaline.
“It’ll be sore for a few days, and you shouldn’t move it much.”