“I want you to let me go.”
Darina stops eating. Osric raises his head and looks at me.
“I want my freedom,” I say. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.”
“Why did you enter the bride market?” His voice holds no trace of accusation.
So, I tell him.
“My parents arranged my marriage to a political ally of my father’s, Garron Wycliffe. He’s older than my father, you see. The engagement was decided in a matter of minutes, and nobody asked me a single question. I was expected to smile and obey. The bride market was the one thing they couldn’t control. If I was going to be sold either way, I wanted to choose the buyer myself, in public, where my family had to stand and watch.”
Darina sighs softly.
When I finish, Osric nods.
“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says.
“Then let me go.”
“Where would you go?”
I don’t have an answer, and he watches me while I fail to find one.
“I don’t know,” I say, at last. “I don’t know where I’d go. I only know I want to be free. I’ll repay you what you spent on me, all four hundred credits, every single one.”
He looks down at his plate. His tail slides low and disappears under his chair, out of sight. His shoulders curve inward over the table, and he looks hurt. I don’t understand why. He’s just met me. I have no idea why he bought me, and I’m not ready to ask, either. Maybe he did it because he felt sorry for me. When he finally speaks, his voice is so low I have to lean in to hear it.
“You may leave whenever you want,” he says. “You’re not a prisoner in this house. You can also stay as long as you need. Both of you. Until you decide what you want to do next. I won’t ask anything from you. And you don’t have to pay me back.”
I wait for the rest of it, for the condition, for the price he’ll name once I’ve relaxed. In Concord, every kindness came with terms attached.
He offers nothing else. He rises, gathers the plates, and carries them away.
Darina and I are left alone.
There has to be a trick in it somewhere, but I can’t find one.
My father decided my marriage in his study and never asked for my opinion. Garron pressed his thumb into my waist while we danced and told me he couldn’t wait to be alone with me. My mother begged me to obey and called it love. The auctioneer looked at me and told me to go home. Not one of those people, from the first to the last, asked me what I wanted.
Osric paid for me and my best friend. He carries enough venom in his tail to kill us both, and hundreds of monsters shrank away from him when he walked toward the stage. He sat at his own bad dinner, wounded by my asking him to let me go, and put the decision in my hands anyway.
The monster who bought me is the first male to ever give me a choice.
Chapter Six
Osric
Esme stops halfway up the stairs and looks down at me.
I’m standing at the table with two plates of uneaten food in my hands. Our eyes meet, and the clicking starts low in my chest and climbs into my throat. I turn my head and cough into my shoulder until it dies. When I look up again, she’s at the top of the stairs, following Darina toward their rooms. I hear their doors close, one and then the other.
I carry the plates into the kitchen, throw out the food, and fill the basin with water.
The work is good because it keeps my hands busy while the rest of me settles. It has a clear beginning and a clear end, which is more than I can say about anything else in my life right now. I scrape the plates, stack them, and start washing.
She’s my mate, and the clicking starts every time she’s near. It fired in the auction hall when she stepped onto the stage, then in the car, where I could smell her hair loose in the wind. At dinner, while she pushed my sorry excuse for food around her plate. Each time, I killed it with a cough or a cleared throat.
Nim comes in through the gap in the vent she treats as her own door, and settles on the counter, ears up, tail curled over her paws. I cut a strip of the leftover meat and set it down in front of her. She gobbles it without a single complaint.
