"You look like a male on a mission."
Remmen came up from the street unhurried, in the long pressed coat that announced, to anyone looking, that we lived in a town now and not a gladiator camp. His horns swept up tall, the curved points capped in worked silver. A folio under one arm, and that politician's warmth on his face that cost him nothing to wear.
"The office is shut," I said.
"It is," he agreed. "Nezara's at the courthouse all week. There's paperwork, after the business at Zarcal's. The kind that goes up the line." He watched me as he said it. "Off-world likes to know when one of us puts a hand on a human bride."
"That wasn't what happened." I heard my own voice flatten. "Don't let it get written up wrong, Remmen. Zarcal went back to the pits in his own head and he didn't come out. If I'd been five minutes slower there'd be a dead woman in his kitchen instead of a hole in the wall."
The warmth left his face. "I read the report."
"Then you know it isn't only Zarcal." I didn't want to say the rest, but said it anyway. "We came off those transports five years ago and built a town. We told ourselves the war was over when the bloodshed stopped. It isn't over. It went quiet and moved indoors. You keep putting fragile little humans into houses with males who wake up swinging, and one of these days you'll bury one of them."
He didn't argue. That was the unnerving thing about Remmen. He never argued when it counted. "What do you want me to do about it?"
"Find someone who knows how to mend the part of us the arena broke. Not bones. The other part. Put them on the town's coin and make it a thing a male can walk into with no one calling him soft for it." I shrugged, already uncomfortable with the size of what I'd said. "Zarcal would have gone. Years back, if there'd been a door to walk through."
Remmen looked at me a moment longer than the conversation needed.
"That's the most you've said to me in a year," he said.
"Don't get used to it."
"I'll look into it." He didn't make it sound like a politician saying it, which from Remmen was nearly alarming. He tucked the folio tighter. "Go home, Lorkin. You've got the look of a male with somewhere better to be."
Stars help me, I did.
The cottage was too quiet when I came back.
Chloe was sitting on the edge of my bed, dressed, her hair pulled back, and there was a bag at her feet. A big one, full and buckled. Not the little Agency satchel. The whole of her, packed.
"I walked over to Zarcal's while you were out," she said before I could get a word in. "I got my things. The house is—" She stopped, started over. "Somebody should fix his wall before he comes home. He shouldn't have to walk in and see that."
Even now. Even packed and braced for the worst, worrying about his well-being.
She had her hands folded in her lap, very still, the grin nowhere in sight. "Is it time?" she asked. "You can give it to me straight. Do I wait for the ship here, or do I save us both the hassle and take myself to the port?"
She'd packed her whole life into one bag and carried it across town, past the wall a male had nearly killed her through. She'd come back to sit on my bed and ask me, polite as anything, to confirm she was being sent away. That was the only ending she'dever been given. You get the good night, and then you get the bag and the door.
I crossed the room. I picked the bag up off the bed and dropped it over the far side, out of sight, where neither of us had to look at it.
Then I took her face in both my hands, gentle as I knew how, and tipped it up to mine.
"You're not going anywhere," I said.
And before she could find one reason I was wrong, before that quick mouth could talk us both back out of it, I kissed her.
9
CHLOE
I'd beenat the forge three days, and I was prepared to be honest with myself about exactly one thing: they'd been the best three days of my entire life, and I had no idea what to do with that.
The whole town had decided Lorkin was the scary blacksmith who didn't come to things and left it there. Once that male let himself want something, he wanted it with his whole enormous body, all the time, with no brakes and no shame.
He kissed me like he'd die without it. Close to literally. And when we fell into bed, he never once held back, never handled me like the breakable little human everyone else seemed to think I was.
He gave me all of it. All of him. Every single time.
