The prosthetic. The titanium-composite. The excellent, technically-correct, well-fitted, objectively-functional prosthetic.
She thought — and she could not entirely account for why she thought it now, in an alley at two in the morning with a dead man's blood still faintly at the edge of her cleaned hand — she thought of him. The encounter she had refused to file in any logical category.
Raven.
The man who had bypassed every layer of security she owned just to appear before her. He had not looked at her with the quality of someone looking at a problem to be managed. He had looked at her with the quality of someone who already owned the solution.
He had told her — she could still hear the exact, unhurried frequency of his voice saying it — that he would come and heal her leg. Not fix it. Not replace it with something better. Heal it.
