She and her nurse, Lucy, had decided to use the respite provided by the current healthy state of the pack to tackle a number of practical tasks, with Lucy volunteering to set the storeroom to rights. The chaos of battle had left little time for niceties like neatness and logging supplies, and the pre-battle inventory was woefully out of date.

Lara, by contrast, was in the process of updating patient records. The fact was, she didn’t have to record anything. She had the encyclopedic memory of most healers, could recite every injury or illness that had ever befallen one of her patients. But, she had to think of the future, of the person who would take her place were she incapacitated or otherwise out of the picture.

Two hours into it, eyes dry and fighting a jaw-cracking yawn, she looked up to find Riordan hovering in the doorway of her office. The young male was cradling his arm in a very familiar way. Boredom vanished under concern. “Broken?” she asked, already around the desk.

Deep red under his skin. “Not really.”

“Not really?” Having reached him, she could see significant swelling and bruising. “So your arm is just kind of broken?”

He ducked his head.

Surprised—Riordan had the usual youthful cockiness—she shepherded him into the infirmary proper and had him take a seat on a treatment bed. “You want to tell me about it?” she asked, ignoring the technical equipment to run her hands over his injury. As a novice soldier, Riordan needed to be fully functional as soon as possible.

“No.”

Her abilities told her it was a bad break. Frowning at the jagged edges she could sense, she bade him to lie down flat on his back. He resisted until she raised an eyebrow in a silent threat. They both knew she outranked him.

“I’m going to have to straighten this,” Lara said once he was in the position she’d requested, then punched in a strong painkiller through his skin before he could argue against it. The dominants—young or old—were always the worst. The last time Indigo had been injured, Lara had had to threaten to bring the lieutenant’s mother into it before the long-legged woman would cooperate.

Riordan winced at even the slight pressure of the dermal injection, which told her exactly how badly he was hurting. Conscious of his pride, she used her abilities to further dampen the lingering pain. Only when the tension leached out of his body did she run her hands over the arm again, confirming the position and seriousness of the break.

“Is it like seeing a scan inside your mind?” Riordan asked, sounding more like his normal self.

“Hmm?” This was an unusual injury—almost as if the bone had been crushed. Had Riordan not been changeling, with their race’s greater bone density, she’d likely have been dealing with a mass of splinters instead of pieces of solid bone.