I was doing a pretty good job of defending myself, but each blocked punch or kick hurt, and the pain made me madder and madder, until finally I threw a punch of my own.

My lessons with Keane were all about self-defense, not offense. Yeah, I’d learned to kick and punch and grab, but always with the goal of learning to momentarily disable my attacker so I could get away. I was only supposed to attack the most vulnerable parts of his body with the least vulnerable parts of my own. Which was why I took us both by surprise when my fist made contact with his jaw.

If he’d been a real bad guy, it would have been a terrible decision. I’m not strong enough to do a lot of damage with a punch, unless it’s to something really sensitive. Plus there’s the little-advertised fact that, duh, when you smash your fist against something hard, it hurts, and jaw bones tend to be pretty damn hard. So do the shield spells Fae fighters use to protect themselves.

I felt the impact all the way up my arm to my shoulder, and for a moment my fingers went completely numb. I had half a second to register the surprise on Keane’s face—and to feel a malicious thrill of triumph—before the numbness went away and my hand screamed with pain.

I half-expected Keane to take advantage of my distraction—he wasn’t exactly taking it easy on me today—but I couldn’t help cradling my hand against my body, gritting my teeth against the pain. It left me completely undefended, but at that moment I didn’t care.

Keane heaved a dramatic sigh and reached for me. “Let me see it,” he said in a long-suffering tone.

I jerked out of his reach, anger still simmering in my veins. “Don’t touch me!” My knuckles throbbed to the beat of my heart. I saw no evidence that my punch had actually hurt him. Surprising him seemed to be the best I could do. Somehow, that wasn’t quite as satisfying.

Keane rolled his eyes. “Don’t be a drama queen. Let me see the hand. If it’s just bruised, I can heal it. If you broke something, we need to get you to the emergency room.”

“I didn’t break anything.” At least, I hoped I hadn’t.

“Then let me heal it.”

Even the least powerful of the Fae have enough power to heal minor injuries like bruises. Keane, with his Knight heritage, could heal more serious ones than the average Fae, but fixing broken bones was beyond his capabilities. It was a sign of Ethan’s magical genius that he could heal broken bones even though he was neither a healer nor a fighter.

Thinking of Ethan took the last of the fight out of me, and I meekly held out my hand for Keane to examine. The knuckles still throbbed, and my middle finger was starting to swell. I tensed in anticipation as Keane ran his fingers lightly over the back of my hand, examining the damage.

Considering what a hardass he was as a teacher, he was surprisingly gentle with me now as he prodded and poked and forced my fingers to move. Gentle or not, it still hurt, and it took all my willpower not to yank my hand out of his grasp.

“Not broken,” he finally declared with a nod.

I let out a sigh of relief. I needed a trip to the emergency room like I needed another enemy out to kill me. I expected to feel the tingle of Keane’s magic gathering, but instead he let go of my hand and went to pull the coffee table away from the couch.

“You’ll want to sit down for this,” he said in reply to my questioning look. “Unless you want to go to the hospital after all. A real healer can make your hand go numb before fixing the damage, but I can’t.”

I shrugged and walked to the couch. “You’ve healed bruises for me before, and I haven’t swooned.” I put my wrist to my forehead in the classic damsel-in-distress swooning pose.

Keane’s lip twitched like he almost smiled—imagine that! But he didn’t change his mind. He sat on the couch and patted the seat beside him.

“This is different. There’s more damage, and fingers are super sensitive. It won’t last long, but it’ll hurt like a bitch.”

Fantastic. Just the thing to cheer me out of my doldrums. But if I let Keane take care of it, it would all be over in a couple of minutes. If I insisted on seeing a real healer, I might not be able to get an appointment—and assemble an entourage my dad would approve of—for hours.

I plopped down heavily on the sofa, grabbing a throw pillow and clutching it to my chest with my left arm as I once again let Keane take my right. Gripping my wrist firmly with one hand, he laid my hand on his lap. The touch might have been embarrassingly intimate if I hadn’t been hurting so much.

The pain didn’t improve when Keane used his other hand to coax my swelling finger as straight as it would go. I probably should have closed my eyes, or at least looked the other way, because seeing the redness and swelling made me a bit queasy. Still, I couldn’t help watching in sickening fascination as his fingers lightly stroked mine.

“Dana.”

I almost jumped at the sound of his voice. I tore my gaze away from my wounded hand and met Keane’s stunning emerald eyes.

“Sorry,” he whispered, his eyes narrowing in a wince even as he held my gaze. I belatedly realized he’d distracted me on purpose, but the pain hit before I had a chance to tense up in anticipation.

I’d thought the pain when I’d first hit him was bad. The healing was far, far worse. The electric tingle of Keane’s magic prickled, and then it felt like a car had just run over my hand, breaking every bone into tiny fragments. I couldn’t fight my instinctive urge to pull away, but Keane held my hand trapped against his thigh as his magic sank into my flesh.