Astonished, she shook her head. How hard had everyone leaned on him in his life that he accepted this without flinching? To him, this was normal.

Really?

Suddenly, the TAM label wasn’t amusing to her. It seriously pissed her off. He wasn’t some invincible armored tactical vehicle to carry and cover them. He was a flesh-and-blood male.

One who’d been injured protecting them.

Wanting to help him, she moved closer so that she could examine the wound he’d sealed. Alone. Without even thinking to ask for help. That said it all about how others treated him.

She winced at the sight of his injuries. The raw, jagged flesh was next to another scar from a knife wound where someone had practically gutted him.

Was that the injury from Dariana when he’d told her Keris was dead?

He frowned at her. “Why are you so angry?”

“Because you’re wounded!”

“Then shouldn’t I be the one who’s pissed off?”

She sat back to glare at him. “Yes. Yes, you should.”

And still he appeared baffled by her anger on his behalf. “I’m not. So why are you?”

“I don’t know.” That was the truth. If it didn’t bother him, it shouldn’t bother her, and yet it did. “Were you injured anywhere else?”

He twisted at the waist to show her the knife wound on his lower back that had narrowly missed his lung and kidney. From the depth and precision, it must have come from the Partini. “I can’t quite reach that one.”

She pulled his medical pack closer so that she could clean it. “How did you walk so far, like this?”

He shrugged nonchalantly. “It wasn’t safe to stop.”

Oh. Okay. That made all the sense in the Nine Worlds…

To a minsid lunatic.

Sighing, she knew better than to try and talk sense into someone insane. “You know, you really shouldn’t say shit like that to me when I have a knife nearby.”

His fierce features softened to that adorable expression that made her melt.

“What are you doing!”

She ground her teeth at Darice’s outraged snarl as he stormed toward them. Her own fury snapping at his, she glared at him. “Your uncle is badly wounded and I’m trying to tend it.”

Coming up behind Darice, Thia gasped at the sight of the jagged, awful cut Sumi was cleaning. “What do you need me to do?”

“Keep Darice back so that I don’t kill him.”

Darice refused to budge. Instead, he stalked forward to confront his uncle. “She shouldn’t be touching you like that, Dancer. It’s indecent.”

His uncle glared at him as a fierce tic beat in his jaw.

“Can you treat a wound?” Thia asked him.

“No.”

“Then shut up, Darice.”

He pouted like a toddler. “You should tend him, Thia. It’s your place, not hers.”