Because now I know something I did not before. When danger came, he did not hesitate. He did not calculate. He did not preserve himself first and sort out the rest after. His violence turned straight toward my safety and the women near me.
I had seen men with power before on Mars. Men with authority. Men with money. Men who liked being obeyed and called that protection.
This is different.
Kaiven’s power is frightening because it is real. Because it can kill. Because it can take over a room, a road, a fight, a whole camp with one shift in posture or tone. And because when he uses it around me, it keeps landing between me and harm instead of pressing down on me.
That difference is getting harder to ignore.
At midday, one of the boys comes to fetch me from the women’s side of camp with a short phrase I only half understand and a pointed gesture toward Kaiven’s tent. When I arrive, I find food already laid out inside and Kaiven standing near the open flap, speaking low to one of his warriors. The moment he sees me, the conversation ends.
The warrior leaves.
I pause inside the entrance. “Was I late?”
Kaiven looks at me for one long second, as if the question itself tells him more than the answer would.
“No.”
That should be enough, but he adds, “Tava.” The Tigris word lands first. Then he says in English, “Eat.”
There it is again. The command that has started sounding less like an order and more like one of the ways he knows to care for something living. The realization unsettles me enough that I sit without speaking.
He notices everything I eat. Every time. Like he is checking whether my body is catching up to what it should have had allalong. At first, I hated that awareness. Now part of me waits for it. Counts on it.
That is dangerous.
While I eat, he checks the wrap on my shoulder once with only his eyes, not his hands, perhaps judging whether the bite healed cleanly, whether the salve did its work, whether the mark is still troubling me. I notice and almost say something sharp just to protect myself from how intimate that look feels.
Instead, I tear off another piece of bread.
He brings me more water without being asked.
Again, it should feel like a small thing. Here, nothing feels small.
Later, when I go with two other women to the hide frames to help scrape and stretch smaller treated skins, one of the women asks me in simple English, “You hold knife before?”
I nod. “Kitchen work. Scrap work. Not this.”
She grunts. “You learn.”
Another woman nearby says something in Tigris and jerks her chin toward my hands. The first woman answers. Then, slower for my sake, she says, “Good grip. Bad shoulder.”
I freeze for one hot second, sure they are talking about the bite again.
She taps her own shoulder and demonstrates the scraping motion.
“No strength here yet,” she says. “Use back more. Not just arm.”
I exhale quietly and adjust.
The correction helps.
So does the strange, almost painful relief of realizing that not every mention of my body here is about children, fertility, or mating. Sometimes it is only a shoulder that needs to work better for scraping hide. A hand grip. A stance. A task.
That should be obvious. It hasn’t been.
By late afternoon, the camp has fully resumed its normal rhythms, but I feel subtly out of step with them in a new way. The women speak around me more. Work with me more. Correct me more. And yet the center of my day keeps pulling back toward Kaiven in ways I cannot ignore now that the predator attack has put everything into sharper lines.
