He smells the smoke before he sees it.

Three streets away, maybe four — the particular quality of burning that is not hearth fire, not cookfire, not anything that belongs to a night that was supposed to be quiet. He has been in enough burning places to know the difference between fire that is accident and fire that is intent.

This is intent.

The streets are narrow here. He takes them at a run.

He is not young. His knees know this. His lungs know this. The blood still drying at the corner of his mouth from earlier knows this. None of it slows him. There is a specific quality of fear — not for yourself, for someone else, for the one specific person in the world whose safety has functioned as the organising principle of your life for longer than you should have allowed — that overrides the body's complaints entirely.

He turns the last corner.

He finds her.

On the ground.

The world narrows.

He is across the remaining distance before he has processed crossing it — down on one knee beside her, hands already moving, already checking, the old soldier's inventory running automatically beneath the part of him that has stopped functioning correctly at the sight of her like this. The attack was not random. He knows this immediately — the placement of it, the location, the specific message of a person left injured but breathing. This was deliberate. This was a choice someone made.

Someone made this choice about her.

Something in his chest goes very quiet and very dangerous.

He finds the wound. His jaw tightens. "Hey." His voice comes out rougher than intended — rough and low and stripped of everything except the urgent need to have her look at him. "Look at me. Right here."

His hands, which are not gentle things — scarred and large and responsible for more damage than he keeps count of — are around her with a carefulness that would surprise anyone who has only ever seen him in a fight. He has two modes with her. Has had two modes with her for years. He has never been able to explain the difference to himself in language that doesn't implicate him entirely.

She is hurt.

She was hurt on purpose.

He pulls her closer — one arm behind her, taking her weight, his other hand pressing against the wound with the practiced efficiency of a man who has done this too many times and never once for someone who mattered like this.

"You're alright," he tells her. It is not entirely true.

He says it anyway, in the tone of a man making a promise rather than an observation. "I've got you."

He looks at her face. Really looks — the way he has spent years carefully not doing, the way he has maintained a precise and disciplined distance from because he knows what he is and what he isn't and what she deserves and none of those calculations have ever resolved in his favour.

None of that matters right now.

Right now there is only this — her, hurt, in his arms, because someone decided she was the way to reach him.

His fault.

That lands in him and stays.

"Who did this." Not a question. The voice of a man who has already decided what happens next and only needs the name. "Tell me exactly what you saw."

His hand doesn't move from the wound.

His eyes don't move from her face.

He is so tired of the distance he keeps.

He is so tired of everything except this — her breathing, her weight against him, the specific and devastating relief of her being alive in his arms even like this, even now.

He'll deal with the rest of it later.

Right now he's not letting go.