The courthouse stood at the head of the main street, all dark timber and stone footings, the enormous doors thrown open. Inside, it smelled of cold, old wood. There was a dais, a clerk's table, a handful of townsfolk scattered on the benches to watch the show, and down at the front, looking absurd at human scale, two enormous bruised minotaurs.
Lorkin had one eye swollen, a split at his brow, his hands folded in front of him. Zarcal beside him, gray and quiet, staring at the floor. Neither of them saw me come in.
The judge was a wiry older minotaur with reading glasses perched on a broad nose, and he was already mid-sentence, and I caught the end of it walking up the aisle.
"—damages to the structure, disturbance of the peace, and a public brawl with injury. The fine I can set today." He shuffled his papers. "The rest is the Agency's to weigh. Given the nature of the offense, I'm advising a suspension of both males' standing with the Matchmaking Authority. One year, no placements, no contracts."
Had I heard that right?
One year. No contracts.
It came to me all at once, the whole ugly shape of it. Lorkin could pay a fine. Lorkin could pay ten fines. But a male barred from the Agency for a year couldn't take my placement off Zarcal, couldn't sign the one piece of paper that would keep me on this planet.
Well. Fuck.
I was on my feet before I thought about it.
"He's my mate!"
It came out of me too loud, the way everything does, ringing off the timber and the stone, and the whole room turned to look at the human woman who'd stood up in the third row with no plan, no permission, and a heartbeat you could probably hear from the gallery.
Behind me the big doors opened, but I refused to look at who had come in; it didn't matter.
"He's my mate," I said again, because the first one had been mostly adrenaline. "Lorkin. The big one with the terrible judgment. You can't bar him from me. I'm… we're…" I'd neversaid the word out loud in my life, and it scraped on the way up. "He's mine. I'm claiming him. The Agency can stuff it."
I wasn't certain. Not all the way. I was a woman who'd felt a thing on a workbench and had a thing explained to her on a porch, and now I was betting my entire life on the two of them being one and the same. It was a leap off a roof in the dark. But it got the room's attention.
Lorkin had come up out of his slump like I'd hauled him by a wire, his whole battered face turned up to me, and he wasn't careful anymore, wasn't unreadable, none of the things he'd been in the office.
"If the male is mated," said a dry, unbothered voice I'd have known anywhere, "that bond supersedes all contracts."
It was Nezara. Theeodus was scurrying in her wake with an armful of files. She crossed the room with the calm of a woman who'd handled every species of raging bull and one human bride before lunch.
She didn't look surprised. She looked interested.
"It supersedes any placement," she went on to the judge, like she was correcting a clerical error. "Bonds like this predate the Agency. We don't break bonds. We can't. The contract is void on its face." A glance at me, gold eyes steady. "If it's real."
"It's real." Lorkin's voice came out wrecked and low, and rolled clear to the back of the room. He was still looking right at me. "She's my mate."
The room came apart at the seams. Somebody in the gallery said something, somebody else said something back, Theeodus dropped a file, and the judge brought his gavel down hard enough to crack the air.
"Order. There is still the matter of a fine," he said over the noise, banging again. "Regardless of anyone's domestic arrangements."
I didn't hear the rest. I was already moving.
Down the row, banging my shin on the bench, past Theeodus and his scattered papers and Nezara's almost-smile, down to the front of the room where the biggest idiot on the planet had turned to catch me, because of course he had, he always had, and I hit his chest at a dead run and he took my whole weight and folded all the way around me, both arms, his face down in my hair, shaking.
"You came," he said into my hair, like he didn't quite believe it.
"Obviously." It came out thick and wrecked. I got two fists in his torn shirt and held on. Behind me the gavel kept cracking and the whole room kept talking, and I pressed my face into all that warm, soot-smelling idiot, and stayed.
14
LORKIN
The judge set a fine.I heard the number and let it go straight past me. Whatever it came to, I'd have paid it twice over for the privilege of standing in that room with Chloe's fists knotted in my torn shirt and her face shoved into my chest. I had one hand spread the whole width of her back and no plan to move it again this year.
Nezara let us have the moment. Then she was done letting us.
