“Who would I lock the door against?” I asked her, gesturing her ahead of me through the door.
“I mean, I know Tasha has told me how good the men here really are, but it’s still a prison planet,” she pointed out as she stepped inside. “You really don’t think you need a lock on the door?”
“No.” I closed the door, then left her side to build up a fire in the kitchen’s wood stove. It took a moment to get the fire blazing, and Lualhati filled the silence while I worked.
“Aren’t there three of them to one of you, though?” she went on. “Although Rivven seems like he isn’t capable of hurting a lamb. I still can’t quite believe he’s here on a murder conviction.”
“He is,” I told her. “Just like the rest of them.”
“And yet you don’t lock your door.”
The fire had truly caught now. Flickering light licked up the logs. I stood.
“Even if they broke in and came at me, all three at once,” I said, “it would not make a difference. I would have them subdued in a matter of moments.”
Her brows rose in such a manner that I did not think she believed me.
It was little matter if she believed me or not. It was simply the truth.
For some reason, even though I’d just told myself it did not matter if she believed me, I found myself explaining anyway. As if trying to convince her.
“Xennet, Rivven, and Dorn are all strong men,” I said, “but they do not have cycles of military combat training beaten into their bones the way I do.” I gestured at my hip. “And they do not have blaster-style weapons.”
“Yes, well, I don’t have ‘cycles of military combat training,’” Lualhati said. “And I don’t have a weapon, either.”
“Are you worried about that?” I asked her bluntly. “About not having a lock on the door?”
She seemed to ponder this. Her little blunt teeth caught her lower lip between them. For too long a moment, I could focus on nothing but that soft, red flesh, and the white biting into them.
Then, she released her lip and shot me yet another smile. Just how many of them did she have at her disposal?
“It sounds,” she said, “like I’ve already got the biggest, baddest thing in the woods right here in the house with me.”
It took me longer than I would have liked to admit to realize that she meant me.
Biggest? Perhaps.
Baddest?
I did not like the sound of that. It was translating into something like “worst.”
I had not cared what anyone thought of me in a long, long time.
But apparently, I cared now. Because I did not like to think that she thought me the worst man here.
“That will be your bedroom,” I told her stiffly, indicating the spare room next to mine. “If it would make you feel better, I will put a lock on its door. And you will be the only one with the key.”
“Oh, no, that isn’t what I meant,” she said at once.
“What is it you did mean, then?”
What did you mean when you called me the worst thing in these woods?
“I just meant,” she said, “that I guess the lack of lock on the front door is kind of irrelevant…” Her gaze darted away, then came fluttering, almost shyly, back to my face. “Since I have you in here to protect me.”
“You do.” It came out as a kind of croak. Perhaps due to the woodfire smoke, though the relentlessly rational part of my mind knew that the chimney was more than adequate. The air quality in here was not to blame.
“Well, that’s all I need to know, then!”
