Page 10 of C is for Captive

She set her own dish down and looked at the tangle of chains, understanding immediately that she couldn’t fix them. They were locked, and she had no key, and even if she had, she wasn’t fool enough to unlock the biggest prisoner in Port Rusk with a guard forty feet up the corridor. Which meant she couldn’t put the food down anywhere he could eat it.

She sighed and uncovered the dish. She’d made it specifically for him, the way she’d been quietly doing for days now. Instead of cheap protein bricks, she’d cooked stewed roots and added river-fish she’d flaked apart with her fingers, along with the grain-heavy bread he liked. She scooped up some of the fish with a piece of the bread, and shuffled forward on her knees until she was close to him. She was closer than she’d been since the day she’d cleaned his wrist, close enough to feel the heat coming off that vast body like an open oven, and then she lifted the food to his mouth.

He froze, staring at her.

“It’s this or you starve.” Her hand was shaking, and she hated that, and she held it up anyway. “And I didn’t flake a whole fish apart with my thumbs to watch you starve on principle. Open.”

For a long moment he only looked at her. Those unreadable silver eyes held hers with the intensity that had frightened her the very first day and now did something else to her entirely. Then his lips parted, and he leaned forward the inch the chains allowed and he took the food from her fingers.

His mouth closed over her fingers. She felt the warmth of it, the faint graze of a fang held carefully away from her skin, and then the pull as he took the bite and drew back. He never once looked away from her. He chewed and swallowed and watched her the whole time. There was nothing dumb in that gaze, nothing beast in it, nothing but a fierce banked attention fixed on her like she was the only real thing in the room.

She fed him another bite. A soft bit of root this time, and his mouth closed over her fingertips a fraction of a second longer. She felt the heat of his breath, and something low in her belly pulled tight in a way she had no business allowing.

“You’d think,” she heard herself say unsteadily, filling the terrible intimate silence the only way she knew, “a warrior who put three males on the floor could manage to feed himself. But no. He has to be waited on hand and foot. Like a—” her breath caught as his lips grazed her fingers again— “like a prince.”

Something moved in his eyes. Amusement. That dry silver spark she’d learned to find, warm and aimed at her, and it undid her more than the growling ever could have.

Bite by bite she fed him. She lost track of how long it took. It felt outside of time, the two of them in a small circle of quiet, the compound and the guards and the whole grinding machinery of Port Rusk gone soft and far away. There was only the weight of his gaze and the warmth of his mouth and the deliberate care he took, every single time, to keep those fangs from ever coming near her skin. He could have taken her whole hand off. She knew that. He knew she knew it. And he took each piece of food as gently as if her fingers were something he’d break by breathing wrong.

When the dish was nearly empty she noticed a fleck of the root stew caught in the hard line of his lips. Without thinking, she reached up and brushed it away with her thumb.

He didn’t move. Neither did she.

Her thumb rested at the corner of that surprisingly soft mouth, and his lips brushed it with the faintest pressure, no more than a breath, but unmistakably deliberate, and everything in the whole rotten galaxy stopped. His eyes had gone dark, the silver swallowed down to a thin bright ring, and they were fixed on hers, and she couldn’t look away, and she didn’t want to. She could feel his breath against her wrist. She could feel her own heart slamming so hard against her ribs that she was sure he could hear it and know exactly what was happening to her. Neither of them breathed. Neither of them moved. His mouth against her thumb, her eyes locked on his, and the air between them so thick and close it felt like a storm about to break⁠—

“Oi.” Boots in the corridor as the young guard approached, closer than he had any right to be. “You still in there, kitchen help? It doesn’t need a bedtime story.”

She snatched her hand back as the world rushed in. The smell of blood and metal and danger surrounded her as the guard’s shape darkened the doorway. She was on her feet with the empty bowl gathered against her chest and her face schooled back into flat boyish nothing before the guard had finished the sentence.

“Just clearing the bowls,” she said, and her voice came out steady, thank every god she didn’t believe in, flat and bored and utterly unremarkable. “It’s fine. Barely moves.” She stacked the morning’s untouched dish under the empty one and ducked her chin and made herself small and forgettable and walked towards the door.

She didn’t look back at him. She didn’t dare. But she felt his eyes on her the whole length of the cell, and she felt them still after the door had ground shut behind her and she was walking too fast up the corridor with her pulse thundering in her ears.

That night she couldn’t sleep. Her little room over the restaurant had never felt so small. She lay on the narrow cot with the quilt kicked down around her ankles and stared at the water-stained ceiling and listened to Pelloq’s floorboards settling, and she could not make her body be quiet.

Instead her body hummed. That was the only word she had for it. Some low restless current ran beneath her skin and would not switch off. Something gathered hot and insistent low in her belly, an ache she hadn’t let herself feel in four careful, invisible years. She’d unwound the binding from her chest hours ago and now even the drag of the blanket against her bare skin felt like too much and not enough at once. She pressed her thumb against her mouth in the dark, where his lips had brushed it, and something clenched sweet and low and hopeless inside her.

I’ve lost my mind, she told the ceiling. He’s a prisoner. He’s a Tuori warrior twice my size. He’s chained to a wall in a slaver’s compound and I’m lying here—she couldn’t even finish the thought.

She turned onto her side and curled up small, the way she slept, the way she did everything. And in the darkness behind her eyes she relived every moment. The way he’d stopped growling the instant she flinched. The way he’d pressed himself to the wall to make her less afraid. The way he’d taken each bite so carefully from her hands and never once looked away, like she was someone worth seeing. Like she was the whole world.

Nobody had looked at her like that in four years. Nobody had looked at her like that in her whole life.

She pressed her face into the flat pillow and let out a trembling breath, and lay awake, restless and aching and thinking about her warrior, long after the compound and the port and the indifferent night had gone quiet around her.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Brannik had spent the whole night trying to work out how to stop it. He lay against the cold wall with his wrists throbbing in their restraints and turned the problem over the way he’d once turned over ship manifests and dock schedules and the movements of males he intended to kill. Coldly. Methodically. A problem to be solved. He was good at that. He’d survived thirty-six years and a childhood that should have broken him by looking at a bad situation, stripping the feeling out of it, and finding the clean path through it.

And the clean path was obvious. Stop letting her close.

The instincts that had kept him alive agreed. He knew what he was inside these walls. He was a resource with an unusual set of eyes, held for a patron who collected biological curiosities, and the males who held him were the sort who’d learned young that everyone had a lever. They’d tried pain. Pain didn’t work on him because he’d had a bellyful of pain before his voice had even broken and it had stopped being a language he could be threatened in a long time ago. They’d tried hunger. Hunger he could outlast. So they were still looking for the lever that would work.

And he’d nearly handed it to them.

If a single one of those guards had looked through the cell door and seen the small kitchen worker with the covered dishes and the timid boy’s slouch feed him by hand. If they’d caught the way he leaned into it and put together why the beast that broke wrists went soft for one particular slight figure, they’d have their lever. They wouldn’t touch him. They’d touch her. They’d do it in front of him, slowly, and they’d watch his face while they did, and he would tell them anything. He would tear the wall out and hand them his own throat, and it wouldn’t matter because they would have already learned the one thing they needed to know.

He knew all of this. He’d known it lying sleepless in the night, and he knew it as the corridor lights came up, and he knew it as her footsteps came down the passage. Light, quick footsteps that he could have picked out of a thousand.