But tonight the work isn’t enough, and my thoughts keep drifting to her. I keep seeing the bruise along her jaw. It’s wide and dark, which makes me think it’s from a fist or an open hand that caught the bone. The one on her cheekbone is turning green at the edges, so whoever hit her did it before she arrived at the bride market. And the marks on her arms, the ones she tried to hide by tugging her sleeves down… I saw them before she managed to cover them. Those weren’t accidents. Someone did that to her with intent, more than once.
I’ve heard about this in the Narrowhalls. Human men who hurt their women behind closed doors. The citadel guard has had to step in more than once when a husband’s hands got rough, and each time I hear about it, I can’t wrap my head around it.
Golem women carry our children and bring them into the world, and the pain of that is beyond what any male body could survive. We respect our women because they are the bringers of life, and that respect isn’t a decision we make, it’s woven into who we are. Raising a hand against a woman is so far outside what a golem is that I don’t even have a frame for it.
But humans are not golems. And someone put those bruises on Sorina. A boyfriend, a father, or a brother, someone she was trapped with. And I stood in front of her when we arrived through the portal and watched her flinch away from my hands. I understand why, so I’m not judging her for it.
I wanted to ask who did it. I nearly did. But she was shaking and wouldn’t look at me, and I wasn’t going to stand over a woman I’d just purchased at an auction and demand that she explain her wounds to a stranger.
The pull I felt when she walked onto that stage was real. It hit me behind the ribs, sudden and impossible to mistake for anything else. Or so I tell myself. I’d hoped for it on my previous trips to the bride market, and not once did the pull come. Not with any of the other women. Still, I tried, hoping against my better judgement. This time it happened, and the sensation still sits in my chest, steady and warm. But a pull is not a bond. The pull has led golems wrong before. It’s rare, but it happens. The bond needs contact. Skin on skin, long enough for the warmth to build and settle into both bodies, long enough to know for certain. And Sorina flinched when I touched her.
I won’t do it again without her permission. I won’t find excuses for contact, won’t brush against her if we find ourselves in the same room, won’t reach for her when she stumbles. If she is my mate, and I believe she is, then the bond will hold. And if my body gives out before she’s ready, then it gives out. I would rather calcify than become one more man who took something from her that she did not offer.
I pick up the setting punch and position it against the fourth prong. My right hand grips the handle, and I line the tip up where the gold needs to fold over the diamond’s edge. I press down in the most controlled way I can manage.
My fingers seize. It’s an abrupt freeze, every joint in my hand locking rigid at once. A shudder rolls through my knuckles, into my wrist, and up through my forearm. I try to hold the punch in position, but I can’t. The tip skips off the prong, drags across the gold setting, and the force knocks the earring sideways in the clamp. I hear a small, clean snap. The fourth prong breaks at the base and falls onto the bench, catching in a groove.
The diamond sits loose in the setting, held crookedly by three prongs. The piece is ruined. I would need to solder a new prong, file it to shape, and start the setting process from the beginning, but I can’t hold a file right now. I can’t hold anything.
I shove back from the bench and stand. I’m breathing heavily, my chest expanding painfully, and in a moment of frustration, I swipe my hand across the workbench. The trays fly off, stones scattering across the floor, bouncing off the flagstones and rolling into the cracks. Pliers and files clatter against the wall. Spools of wire bounce and unravel. The finished earring on its square of cloth flies off the bench and disappears somewhere near the door.
A sound tears out of my chest, low and raw, and my jaw aches from opening wide to let it out. Because even my jaw is stiffening, even that is being taken from me. I grab the edge of the workbench with both hands, my locked fingers barely hooking under the rim, and I heave it over. The bench crashes onto its side. The magnifying lens shatters, and drawers spill open and dump everything across the floor.
I stand in the middle of it and breathe. The electric light buzzes overhead, unchanged. Diamonds, silver, gold, and broken glass are scattered at my feet. The bench lies on its side with one leg cracked.
The anger drains out of me as fast as it came, and what replaces it is worse. My hands hang at my sides, still shaking, and I look at what I’ve done to the only room in this citadel that still gives me a sense of purpose.
I bend down, and my knees grind as I lower myself. A small file lies near my right foot, and I pick it up with stiff, unsteady fingers and set it on the edge of the overturned bench. I pick up a pair of pliers, then a spool of wire. I keep going because this is a mess I made, and no one else should have to clean it up. Also, no one should walk in here and see it.
I find the finished earring near the door. It isn’t bent, so I set it aside and keep going. I put every tool, stone, and spool back where it belongs, and I right the bench with a shove that takes more effort than it should. I sweep the broken glass into a pile with the side of my boot. The workshop looks close to how it did before, except the magnifying lens is gone, the bench has a cracked leg that needs fixing, and the second earring still needs a new prong. But it’s in order.
I lower myself onto my stool, rest my hands flat on the bench, and wait for the shaking to stop.
Chapter Five
Sorina
A knock on the door pulls me out of sleep.
I sit up and squint at the daylight coming through the narrow window. It’s late afternoon, and I fell asleep without meaning to, on top of the furs, still in my travel clothes. Even my boots are on and tightly laced. I don’t remember lying down.
I haven’t slept this deeply in months. Not since before the wedding, maybe longer. In Tessana, Bran’s parents had a key to the house, and they let themselves in whenever they wanted. Mornings, evenings, once in the middle of the night when his mother decided she needed to go through his things. After Bran died, it got worse. They came more often, stayed longer, and watched me like I owed them something. I stopped sleeping through the night, waking up at every sound, every creak in the floorboards, and every footstep outside the door.
But here, in a room I’ve never been in before, inside a mountain I couldn’t find on a map, I closed my eyes and slept. I don’t know what to make of it.
The knock comes again.
I go to the door and open it. Korr fills the hallway.
“Are you hungry?” he asks. “I’m heading down to the Corehalls for dinner. You’re welcome to join me.”
“I am hungry,” I say.
The Corehalls are where the golems gather to eat, I remember. I picture myself at a golem-sized table surrounded by stone figures twice my height, all of them watching me chew.
“My sister and her husband will be there,” he says. “But don’t feel pressured about meeting them.”
His sister and her husband. I think about sitting across from two golems I don’t know, trying to make conversation, trying to eat while they study me and form opinions I won’t be able toread on their stone faces. It’s too much, too fast. I’ve known Korr for less than a day, and I can barely handle him, let alone his family. They are enormous, all of them, and I can’t pretend that doesn’t scare me.
