standing. He lay on his back on the dirt, his bare chest covered with a sheen of sweat and streaks of blood. Our gazes locked, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do—kick him, punch him, or comfort him. So I turned away, stepping toward Elijah.
He was in worse shape than Mason—it’d never really been a fair fight—and he lay on his side, the tattoo on his back marked with small scratches from the rough ground. Finn and Cole stood motionless, and it was the first time I’d ever seen the two of them wear matching expressions.
Shock.
“Help him if you want to,” I said shortly, gesturing to Mason before crouching down beside Elijah and wrapping his arm around my shoulder. He stood unsteadily, leaning a lot of his weight on me, and I didn’t look back at the other three as we staggered away.
My phone was lying by the tree where I’d hidden—it’d fallen screen-down, thank God—and I leaned Elijah against the trunk and surreptitiously stopped the recording before slipping it back into my pocket.
He hadn’t said a word since the fight, and we didn’t speak at all as I helped him out of the woods. By the time we passed through the hole in the wall, he was walking a little more steadily, but he still seemed to weave from side to side.
I took him past Prentice Hall—it was closer, but I didn’t want to bring a Prince into my dorm room—and brought him up to Clarendon. When we reached it, I fished his key out of his back pocket and opened the door.
His dorm was messy like always. He winced when I flicked the overhead light on, so I turned it back off and switched on a lamp in the living room instead before drawing the curtains on the windows shut. I helped him sit on the couch, and when he leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, little droplets of blood dripped from his nose onto the hardwood.
“First aid kit?” I asked.
“Bathroom. Under the sink.” His voice was thick and low, and he didn’t look up.
Right. Each of the dorms came stocked with a little kit, although I was sure these weren’t at all the kinds of injuries the Oak Park staff had assumed the students would be patching up.
I walked quickly to the bathroom and retrieved the kit and a washcloth, trying not to notice the way Elijah’s oak and sage smell permeated the space or the small comb resting on the edge of the sink—all the little things that made this his space, that made him seem too human for comfort.
It was easier to hate the Princes when they were just the untouchable children of gods.
Elijah hadn’t moved by the time I got back, and there were several more droplets of blood decorating the floor. I snagged a box of tissues and used one to wipe up the little red blotches. Then I pushed the coffee table a little farther from the couch and sat on the end of it, facing the boy with light brown hair.
“Tilt your head up.”
He slowly did as I asked, and when I got a good look at his face in the light, I sucked in a breath. His nose was dripping blood, and it had smeared across his face during the fight. A large red bruise was already visible along the line of his cheekbone on the left side, punctuated by a cut near his temple, and the skin under his eye was dark purple.
He didn’t react to the sound I’d made, just watched me steadily as I finally gathered myself together and dug into the first aid kit. I used a little washcloth to wipe away the blood on his face, going easier on the spots where he winced at the contact. He had some bruises and scrapes on his back and shoulders from rolling around on the ground, but I didn’t think he’d gotten hit anywhere else.
Mason and he had both been going for the face.
I pinched the bridge of his nose until the bleeding ebbed, keeping my attention on my task even as his hazel eyes tracked my every movement. When it finally stopped bleeding, I grabbed a small bandage from the kit and pressed it over the cut on the side of his face.
As I worked, smoothing the bandage down, his hand mirrored mine, rising up to ghost gently over the side of my face, his fingertips running over the curve of my