The Scan

POV: Matteo

"I have a headache," I said, the moment the healer's assistant began setting up the scanning equipment. "A bad one. Maybe we should reschedule."

The assistant, a different woman than before, brisk and unmoved by delay, glanced at me with polite but firm dismissal. "The scan itself only takes a few minutes, my lord. It shouldn't aggravate a headache."

"Still," I said, my heart already hammering. "If there's any flexibility in the schedule—"

"There isn't, unfortunately," she said, checking something on her clipboard. "We have three other appointments after yours. I'm afraid Friday's the day."

Rhys glanced over at me from where he sat on the edge of the examination table, his shirt already off in preparation for the procedure, something curious crossing his face at my persistence. "Is it really that bad? We could ask for tomorrow instead."

"It's fine," I said too quickly, hating myself for the whiplash of it, delaying and then abandoning the delay in the same breath. "Let's just get it over with."

The assistant nodded, satisfied, and moved toward the cabinet to retrieve the scanning device, some sleek instrument I didn't recognize from any procedure I'd witnessed before. My stomach twisted harder with every step she took.

"I could use some water first," I said. "Actually. Is there time for that."

"My lord," the assistant said, not unkindly but with the particular patience of someone who'd run out of it several sentences ago, "the procedure genuinely takes only a few minutes. Perhaps we should simply proceed, and you can have all the water you'd like afterward."

I had nothing left to offer her. No more small, deniable excuses that wouldn't sound increasingly suspicious the longer I dragged this out. I sat down in the chair beside the examination table, my hands folded tight in my lap to keep them from shaking, though I could already feel the tremor building underneath my careful composure.

"You seem nervous," Rhys said, watching me closely now, some of the softness in his expression sharpening into something more focused.

"It's a medical procedure," I said. "I don't love those."

"You didn't seem nervous during any of my other checkups," he said.

"This one's different," I said, which was true in every way that mattered and none I could explain.

The assistant approached with the scanner, a small handheld device that hummed faintly when activated, and gestured for Rhys to lie back against the table. "This measures the bonding resonance between the two of you," she explained, more to me than to him, since he'd already heard this once. "It's most accurate with physical contact maintained throughout. If you'll take his hand, my lord."

I reached for Rhys's hand on reflex, the way I'd done a hundred times over the last two weeks, and felt my own fingers trembling the moment they closed around his.

He noticed instantly.

"Matteo," he said, quiet, his thumb pressing against the back of my hand, steadying it, or trying to. "You're shaking."

"I'm fine," I said, the lie sitting badly in my mouth now, thin and obvious even to my own ears.

"You're not fine," he said, and something in his voice shifted as he said it, the softness dropping away like a curtain pulled back, replaced by something sharper, more focused, more familiar in a way that made the hair on my arms rise before I understood why.

The assistant hovered nearby, scanner ready, patiently waiting for some invisible cue to begin, oblivious to the current running suddenly thick and dangerous between us.

"What aren't you telling me?" Rhys asked.

His voice carried weight I hadn't heard from him since before the ambush. Not the gentle, searching uncertainty he'd worn every day since waking in that hospital bed. This was control. This was command. This was, for one disorienting, terrifying moment, the exact voice of the man who'd stood over me at our wedding and told me I was nothing but a debt paid.

I stared at him, my whole body gone rigid, the careful, gentle stranger I'd let myself fall for suddenly nowhere in the room with us, replaced by something colder, sharper, more certain of itself than any version of him I'd seen since the ambush.

"What did you just say," I whispered.

"I asked what you're not telling me," he said, and though the words themselves were gentle enough, the voice underneath them was not, steady and precise in a way that made my chest ache with a recognition I didn't want to feel. "You've been distant all week. You delayed this scan four different ways in the last two minutes. Your hands are shaking so hard I can feel it. Something is wrong, and I want to know what it is."

The assistant cleared her throat softly, the scanner still hovering, patient but no longer entirely comfortable with the tension thickening the air around her. "My lord, whenever you're ready, we can begin. Or, if you'd like a moment—"

"Just one moment," Rhys said, not looking away from me, his grip on my hand tightening slightly, not painful, but certain, immovable, the kind of hold I hadn't felt from him since before he woke changed.

I sat there frozen, my mind racing through every possible answer, every careful shading of truth that might satisfy him without giving away the whole of it. I could tell him about the headache lie, admit to nerves about medical procedures, offer some small, digestible piece of honesty that wouldn't crack the larger structure of everything I was still choosing not to say.

Or I could tell him the truth. All of it. The pregnancy sitting unspoken between us, the greenhouse, the flicker of recognition I'd caught on his face days ago, Dave's confession about the ambush, every secret currently balanced on the edge of a breath I hadn't yet decided how to take.

"Matteo," Rhys said again, quieter now, but no less certain, his eyes locked on mine with an intensity that felt like it was seeing straight through every careful wall I'd built over the last two weeks. "Tell me."

The assistant shifted her weight, scanner still raised, waiting, the machine's faint hum the only sound filling the space where my answer should have already been.