Page 11 of C is for Captive

So he had it decided. He would not draw her close. He would keep his eyes flat and dumb, the way he did for everyone else. He would let her set the food where he could reach it, and he would not lean, and he would not look, and in a day or two she’d take it for what it was—a wounded beast losing interest—and she’d go back to being safe and unremarkable. Invisible. Alive.

The door groaned open. Her scent came in ahead of her, cut through today with something he’d never smelled on her before—a sweet unmistakable heat that put every nerve in his enormous body on a wire and made a mockery of every clean line he’d drawn in the dark.

Stop letting her close, he ordered himself.

And then, when she crouched to set the dish down in front of him, he moved. He couldn’t have said he decided it. His body simply did it, the way it had tucked itself against the wall yesterday when she’d flinched, obeying a deeper prerogative than the cold logic in his head. He shifted along the wall, drew his knees under him, and closed the distance the chains would allow until he was near enough that she could reach him without stretching if she wanted to. He waited there, looking at her and waiting to see her back away.

She didn’t back away.

She went still, and he saw the flicker of instinctive, animal caution in her eyes, a caution he recognized all too well, and then she let out a breath. She set the dish down right in front of him, and she stayed crouched there next to him, and she looked up into his face like he was someone worth looking at. Something in his chest, something he kept chained tighter than his wrists, strained hard against its restraints.

“You slept about as well as I did, then,” she said in a low voice, flat out of habit, but he could hear the warmth beneath it. “You look like something dragged behind a hauler.” Her eyes moved over the fresh mark on his cheek, and her jaw tightened. “They did that this morning?”

He gave her the smallest shake of his head. No. Yesterday.

“Good.” A breath. “I mean—not good. But good they left off.” She started sorting the food with her fingers, finding the small pieces of real protein, the way she’d taken to making it for him. He watched her hands and hated that he watched her hands and watched them anyway.

“You know you could just tell me. If they’d hurt you. If you needed—” She stopped, and wet her lips and that small movement threatened to destroy his control. “Why won’t you talk?”

He said nothing. He had reasons. He always had reasons, and they were good ones—silence was armor, silence was a weapon, silence was the one wall his uncle’s family had never managed to knock out of an eleven-year-old who’d already had everything else taken. Silence had kept his thoughts his own through interrogations that would have made a lesser male beg. He’d built his whole self on that silence.

And today it weighed on him heavier than it ever had. Because he wanted—gods, he wanted—to answer her. He wanted to tell her his name in his own voice. He wanted to tell her she made food like a benediction and that no one else had worried about what he ate in twenty-five years. He wanted to tell her she was in danger just by kneeling here and that he’d burn this compound to the ground before he let them touch her. The words were all right there, locked behind his teeth, but the wall he’d built held, the way it always held, and he hated it for the first time in his life.

He looked at her instead. He let her see it in his eyes, whatever fraction of it his eyes could carry.

“I don’t need you to,” she said quietly, like she’d read some of it after all. “Talk, I mean. That’s not—I’m not asking for that.” She fed him a piece of fish and he took it carefully from her fingers, and she watched his mouth the way she had yesterday and color came up under the darkened stain on her cheeks. “I talk to you,” she went on, unsteady, “because I think you actually listen.” Her voice caught. “No one listens to me. But you do, don’t you? You hear every word.”

He held her eyes and nodded slowly and deliberately, a whole answer in that one movement. Every word. I hear every word you have ever said to me.

Her whole face softened. He watched it happen and it went through him with a sweet, hot pain.

“I knew it,” she breathed, and her relief was palpable, like she’d been holding her breath for a year and only just now been allowed to let it out. “I knew you weren’t like them. I told Pelloq⁠—”

Boots sounded in the corridor—the guard rousing from wherever he’d propped himself. He heard the drag of a chair, footsteps receding towards the intersection, and the low mutter of the guard talking to someone else, their voices growing fainter. Her head turned a fraction, tracking the sounds as well. She was as good at that as he was, this small clever female, always tracking the location of danger. When she’d measured the distance and found it safe, she turned back.

And then she reached up and touched his face.

Or she started to. Her bare fingers came up towards the hard line of his jaw and the mouth she’d wiped clean yesterday, and all of the reasons he’d assembled in the dark scattered like startled birds. But one single fact remained clear and cold in the middle of it—if they see this, they will kill her with it.

His hand came up and caught her wrist. He was always careful with his strength, every hour of every day, but never more careful than now. His fingers closed around the fine bones of her wrist the way he’d close his hand around something that would shatter. There was no pressure in his touch. It was simply a halt, nothing more.

She froze. He felt her pulse leap under his thumb and felt the fear come up in her. He knew now that she wasn’t afraid of him but of having overstepped and been caught wanting something she wasn’t allowed to have. She started to shrink in on herself the way she did, to disappear, and he could not bear it. But then her head came up and her eyes met his, wide and determined.

“I want to touch you,” she whispered.

The words dropped into the quiet cell like a struck bell, and whatever was left of the cold clean line in his head disappeared. He dropped his hand and turned his face into her palm. He couldn’t have stopped it. Twenty-five years he’d gone without a single gentle hand and he turned his cheek into the warmth of her hand. He felt her fingers caress the battered angle of his jaw and he closed his eyes, something long-buried heaving inside his chest. Her thumb moved along his cheekbone, feather-soft over the split. He’d taken blows from three grown Tuori without a sound, but that one touch nearly broke him.

He heard her breath change. She shifted closer, and he felt her heat and caught that sweet restless scent. He opened his eyes and she was right there, so close, her mouth soft and parted and her eyes huge and dark and fixed on his. And he knew, with the last cold sliver of sense he had left, exactly what she was about to do and exactly how catastrophic it was, and he did not move to stop her.

She kissed him.

It was tentative. Just the uncertain press of her lips against the corner of his mouth, an offering more than a claim, the touch of someone who’d forgotten she was allowed to want. It lasted a heartbeat. Just a heartbeat.

Then the part of him that he had chained down every hour of every day for his entire disciplined life tore free. He turned into the kiss. His mouth took hers, gentle and then not gentle, and she made a small sound against him that went through him like a shot. He felt the exact moment when she stopped being tentative and started kissing him back. Her hands came up to rest on the massive breadth of his shoulders, her fingers digging in just a little as she leaned into him.

He curved an enormous hand around her narrow waist and drew her closer and she melted into him. He wanted to gather her close enough that he could feel her heartbeat against his. He wanted to do a hundred things that would terrify her and so he did none of them. He contented himself with the kiss, slow and deep and thorough, pouring into it every word he couldn’t say, every warning he couldn’t give, every impossible thing he’d started to feel for this small female who fed him from her own hands and patched him up with her own shirt.

He kissed her like a starving male because that was exactly what he was, and he had never once admitted it until this brave little creature knelt in a slaver’s cell and put her mouth on his. The bindings bit into his wrists, but he didn’t feel them. He felt how desperately she kissed him back and every instinct he owned lit at once with a single searing certainty. Mine, she is mine⁠—