“I will not stop you. It is your choice.”
She nodded, and then she slid her hand into his.
“But right now,” she said, “I’m choosing to walk home with you.”
His fingers closed carefully around hers. That was enough. It had to be. But he was no longer going to pretend—to himself or to her—that it was all he wanted. He wanted tomorrow. He wanted the day after that. He wanted every morning she had not yet chosen.
He simply had to wait for her to choose them.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The bead Polly was trying to string slipped off the wire again, rolled across the low table, and disappeared in the fur beneath it.
Tess looked up from the stack of records spread around her. “That’s the fourth one.”
“I know.”
“You’re getting worse at this.”
“I’m distracted.”
“Clearly,” Tess said dryly.
Polly retrieved the bead and dropped it back into the little bowl with more force than necessary. “I thought you were supposed to be looking at ship records.”
“I am. I’m also watching you lose a fight with a bead.”
She glared at the other woman, but Tess had already bent over the records again.
The healer’s cave had gradually become less of a healer’s cave and more of a records office over the past several days. Printed manifests covered one end of the low table. Two datapads borrowed from Baralt sat among bowls of beads and lengths of sinew, and Polly had started using different colored stones to mark ships, ports, and dates. Cera had complained about the mess twice, but the fact that she’d made no attempt to clear it away meant she approved.
She sighed and abandoned the necklace, pulling another stack of records towards her. They had been working for most of the morning, trying to trace the ship Tess had escaped from, but it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Baralt had already established that the vehicle registration actually belonged to a freighter that had been dismantled years ago in another part of the Empire. After that, every trail seemed to split into three more.
Tess scowled and shoved another manifest aside.
“This is useless.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I’ve been looking at these things for days and I know exactly as much as I did when we started.”
“That’s not true.”
“Fine. I know that criminals lie on paperwork. Shocking revelation.”
She bit back a smile. Tess’s temper had improved considerably as her strength returned, although perhaps improved wasn’t quite the right word. When they’d first found Tess, most of her personality had been buried beneath fear disguised as hostility.Now Polly was discovering a dry wit, an impressive vocabulary for profanity, and a stubborn impatience that could flare into irritation.
She liked this side of Tess much better.
“Maybe we’re looking at it the wrong way,” she said.
Tess dropped the manifest onto her lap. “I’m listening.”
“We keep trying to find your ship.”
“Yes,” Tess said with exaggerated patience. “Because that’s the ship I was on.”
“But what if we looked for other ships? Other illegal slaving operations.”
