“You looked at his body!” A series of words exploded out of s’Ex’s mouth, unfamiliar ones that sounded like, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

Whatever that meant. She knew English only formally.

s’Ex leaned into her and dropped his voice. “Listen up, you stay out of this. You don’t know what’s going on here.”

“I know that it is unfair to hold an innocent responsible for something that does not concern him.”

“I’m not going to lose my own life over you. Do we understand each other? And I will not alter my course just to please some moral streak you wish to indulge for a moment.”

“Yes, you will.” Now she leaned in—and in spite of his size, s’Ex jerked back. “You are well aware of the power I hold. You shall not cross me in this or any other desire I have—and when I bring him his next meal, you and your males will let me pass in there in peace. I don’t trust you enough to feed him properly—or safely. And do not tell him who I am.”

With that, she put her mesh back into place and started to walk off.

“What’s your endgame,” s’Ex demanded.

She paused. Looked over her shoulder. “What does that phrase mean?”

“What are you going to do? Keep him in there like a gerbil for the rest of his natural life?”

What was a gerbil?

maichen narrowed her eyes beneath the mesh. “That is none of your concern. The only worry you have is if anything happens to him. And bring him a proper bed.”

At least he could be comfortable as she figured out a way to safely set the poor male free.

maichen made it around the corner and out of sight, before she began to shake . . . before she had to catch herself against the wall to stay standing.

Closing her eyes, all she could see was that imprisoned male, walking around the screen as he had reemerged from running the water.

His body had been . . . breathtaking, his naked form arresting her eyes, her thoughts, her breath. Broad of shoulder, thick of chest, long of torso, he had seemed to have been crafted by an artist, rather than born of a mortal.

And then there were the other parts of his body. Which had made her blush so fiercely, she worried the mesh would melt right off her face.

She told herself that she was just going to help him, and that was true. It was.

But it would be foolish to discount this burning curiosity. Mayhap even dangerous to.

Stars above, what was she doing?

When Trez jumped up on the examination table, his head nearly banged the chandelier, and while he ducked to create airspace, Doc Jane came over.

“Here, let me move my lights out of the way.”

With that little problem solved, he gripped the thin mattress under his ass like he was about to go on a roller-coaster ride.

And he absolutely hated roller-coasters.

Doc Jane brought over a rolling stool and sat down, pulling the two halves of her white coat together and linking her hands on her knees. Staring up at him, she seemed prepared to wait for as long as it took him to get his thoughts together.

Clearing his throat, he announced, “She’s not coming down here. She doesn’t want to be fiddled with while she’s feeling well.”

“I can understand that.”

He waited for more, and reminded himself to be civil because she was V’s shellan.

When the good doctor didn’t continue, he frowned. “That’s it?”

“What do you want me to say? That Manny and I are going to make her come see us? I can’t do that—I won’t do that.”

As he felt no relief at all at the statement, Trez realized that he had wanted Doc Jane to force Selena down here.

Hypocrite much? Not really a pro–free will stance, was it.

“How do I know she’s going to make it through the night?” he said tightly.

“Without an Arrest episode?”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t.” Doc Jane brushed her short blond hair back. “Even if I examined her now, I couldn’t tell you when the next one is coming. I don’t know much about the disease, but from what I’ve learned, that’s part of the issue. There is no prodromal stage.”

“What’s that?”

“You have migraines, right?” When he nodded, she pointed to her eyes. “And you get an aura about twenty to thirty minutes before the pain hits, yeah? Well, sometimes sufferers get numbness and tingling in their arms or legs; others have sensory anomalies, like smelling things that aren’t there or hearing things. With Selena’s disease, there is no warning that an acute phase is about to happen. The freezing up seems to occur out of the blue.”

“Have you spoken with that Havers fool?”

“Actually, he’s never heard of such an illness. The closest he’s come is dealing with arthritis-related symptoms.” She shook her head. “It makes me wonder, if we were able to do genetic sampling from the Chosen, whether there would be a recessive gene in them somewhere. With a captive breeding population, such as they have been, you’d expect to find exactly this kind of a disease cluster.” She shrugged. “But back to Selena, I wish I could tell you what was going to happen, or even what to look for. I can’t, though. I’ve done a complete blood panel on her, and her white cell count is slightly elevated along with her inflammatory markers—but other than that? Normal. All I can say is that if she’s up and moving around, her joints are by definition functioning well, and they will let us all know when they aren’t.”

He cracked his knuckles, one by one. “Is there nothing we can do for her?”

“Not that we can think of so far. One of the challenges is that we don’t understand the mechanism of the disease. My suspicion is that after the bone growth is triggered by God only knows what, her immune system somehow rebounds and attacks the offending material, destroying it as if it’s a virus or infection. And her body’s defensive mechanism knows when to stop, as her original skeleton is intact afterward. There probably is something inherently different about the ‘bone’ growth, but I wouldn’t know unless we did a biopsy.”

“So why does she have to . . .” Shit, every time he blinked, he saw Selena lying on the table, her body in that god-awful contortion. “Why can’t she just keep fighting things off and recovering?”

“My guess is, the immune system fails. When you think about it, it’s an extraordinary series of events on the cellular level. When I saw the first set of X-rays, I would never have guessed her body could come back from that to any kind of functioning.”

He fell quiet, and stared at the tile floor. “I want to take her out tonight. You know, for a date.” When the doctor stayed silent, he glanced up. “Not a good idea, huh?”

Doc Jane crossed her arms over her chest, and pushed her chair back and forth on its little black wheels, the seated version of pacing.

Fuck. He should have had this conversation before he’d suggested an excursion—

“How frank do you want me to be?” Doc Jane asked.

Trez had an image of Vishous’s goateed profile highlighted under that ceiling fixture outside in the corridor. “I need to know where we’re at.”

Even if it killed him.

It was a minute or two before Doc Jane answered, and he guessed she was running scenarios in her head. “The most conservative route is for her not to leave the compound, and for me to do a total work-up on her, one that involves multiple biopsies, a CAT scan, an MRI out in the human world, and consults with human doctors through Manny’s contacts. And then we’d probably want to start her on an aggressive course of steroids—even though that’s more a hunch than anything certain, I have to believe the inflammatory process has something to do with all this. There could be other drugs to try, maybe some procedures, but it’s hard to guess at them with any certainty from where I’m sitting right now.” She rubbed at her short hair until the stuff stuck straight up in blond spikes. “We’d have to get moving fast because we don’t know how much time we have, and everything would be trial and error, with probably more of a prolonging goal than a cure. Although again, that’s just a hunch, nothing concrete.”