"Please don't do this," Benjamin said quietly.
He had taken several steps back. His cane was out of reach — somewhere by his bed where he had stood it up against the wall — and the distance between him and Bjorn felt wrong in a way he was already calculating.
Bjorn stood just inside the room, his eyes not on Benjamin. They were on Shirin.
He had come because of her. She had promised him that if he did this one thing, she would owe him a favor — whatever lay within her power to give. It was an offer that had seemed easy to accept in the privacy of his own rooms, when the doctor was still an abstraction. A nuisance. A man Charles had lost his mind over, apparently.
Now Bjorn looked at Benjamin and saw nothing that warranted the fuss. Lean, with a reserved expression. Nothing remarkable about him. What did Charles see in someone like this?
He looked back at Shirin and waited for the signal.
