Isole had him sitting on the cold stone of the kitchen counter with his jacket discarded before Mara had even finished setting the table.
She worked in complete silence. Her fingers glowed with a faint, steady light, moving across the bruised, swollen skin of his left shoulder. She manipulated the damaged muscle and mapped the internal mana pathways with the ruthless efficiency of someone who had been reading broken bodies since she was fourteen.
"L4 strain," Isole diagnosed, her voice entirely clinical. She dug her thumb into a precise knot of muscle. Vane hissed, his jaw tightening. "You have severe channel compression at the secondary junction. You are not to run the full Silver Fang chain until Thursday at the absolute earliest." She pressed two fingers hard against his collarbone, forcing him to look at her mismatched eyes. "Do not argue with me about Thursday."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it."
