Page 12 of C is for Captive

Which was exactly the thought that saved her.

Mine. And they will find her, and they will use her, and it will be because I did this.

He wrenched his mouth from hers. It cost him more than any interrogation ever had. He gently set her away from him with the hand at her waist, even though everything in him screamed to drag her closer. He put as much space between them as the chains allowed, and held himself rigidly against the wall, breathing like he’d run a mile, his chest heaving as he stared at her.

She stared back, wide-eyed with her lips parted and swollen, one hand still half-lifted from where it had been on his shoulder. Wonder and hurt and want and fear warred on her face, and he had no voice to give her an explanation for it all.

He shook his head once. Not now. Not here. Too dangerous.

The hurt on her face deepened, and it was a blade in his chest. She thought he was rejecting her. She thought he didn’t want her, the one person in this whole forsaken place who had seen him as a being and not a beast. She started to shrink away from him, drawing in on herself exactly as she had before, the way she used to survive.

He couldn’t let her. Not like this. He took her hand and placed it right over his violently beating heart as he let a low rumble build in his chest, a deep, resonant purr of reassurance and calm, a sound meant for her alone. Her eyes widened and the hurt on her face started to transform into something else⁠—

The guard’s voice drifted down the corridor, closer now, and she jumped to her feet. She pressed the back of her hand hard against her mouth, and then she turned and went. Her usual quick, light rhythm was nearly a run, out the door and gone before he could so much as move.

He watched the empty doorway where she’d been.

His wrists were bleeding again where the restraints had cut in and he hadn’t noticed and didn’t care. He could still taste her. He could still feel the ghost of her waist in his hand. And the great chained thing in his chest was loose now, awake and roaring, and he understood with total, hopeless, ruinous clarity that there was no putting it back.

CHAPTER NINE

In Amy’s dream there were no chains. There was no cell, no cold wall—just heat, and the deep bronze span of her warrior’s chest under her palms. His silver eyes were half-lidded and fixed on her face as though she were the only thing in the universe worth the looking. In the dream he had a voice, as low and deep as an engine humming, and he said her name against her throat. She felt the shape of it against her skin as one enormous hand slid up the length of her bare spine and gathered her against him, and she arched into him and⁠—

She woke.

She lay in the dark of her small locked room with her heart slamming and her whole body tight and aching. A hot, unbearable ache pulsed low in her belly, her thighs pressed together and her breath coming fast and shallow into the thin blanket she’d fisted against her mouth. The narrow cot creaked under her. The recycler hummed in the wall. Somewhere below, the restaurant’s overnight cooling unit ticked as it cycled. Ordinary sounds. Real ones.

She squeezed her eyes shut and the dream was still there, so vivid it hurt—the heat of his body and the sound of her name in a voice she’d never heard and the desperate grateful way he’d held her. She made a broken noise into the blanket and rolled onto her side, drawing her knees up as if she could push the want down into something small enough to ignore by making herself smaller.

It was a mistake.

That was what she needed to think. That was the safe thought, the survival thought, the kind that had kept her breathing for four years. She’d kissed a prisoner. A chained, half-starved, dangerous prisoner in a slaver’s compound, a male who could snap the guards’ bones like dry reeds and probably hers along with them. She’d knelt right down in front of him and put her mouth on his because she was lonely and stupid and starved for one gentle thing in a life that had run dry of them.

That was all it was. A mistake. She’d let it happen once and she’d feel the shame in the morning and she’d stop, because stopping was what she did. Because stopping and shrinking and disappearing were the only reasons she was still alive.

She lay there in the dark and carefully told herself that, the way she’d once recited safe things to herself in the hold of the ship that took her from Earth. It was a mistake. It meant nothing. It won’t happen again.

And underneath all of it, quiet and stubborn and impossible to kill, the truth sat up and looked her in the eye. The kiss was the best thing that had happened to her since they’d taken her.

She thought of the way he’d turned his face into her palm. The way that enormous, terrifying, battered warrior had closed his eyes and leaned into the warmth of her hand like it was water and he’d been years in the desert. Nobody had ever looked at her like that. Not on Earth, in the small ordinary life she barely let herself remember. Certainly not here, not ever.

He’d looked at her like he’d seen all of her, the woman under the boy’s slouch and the stain and the bindings, the person she’d flattened down to nearly nothing to stay alive. Being seen like that was terrifying but it was also the first time in four years she’d felt, for the length of one kiss, entirely and completely real.

She pressed the heel of her hand against her aching eyes.

“Stupid,” she whispered into the dark, her voice cracked and shaking. “You stupid, stupid⁠—”

But she didn’t finish it, because she didn’t believe it, and lying to yourself only worked if you could make yourself believe it. She’d lost the ability to do that somewhere between his mouth and the coming dawn.

She got up before the ache could turn into something she’d have to do something about. She splashed cold water onto her face from the small sink and stood there gripping the edge of it, until the woman in the small mottled mirror looked something like the boy she needed to be.

The compound felt wrong before she’d even cleared the outer gate.

She’d always noticed things—it was half of why she was still alive—and four years of making herself into furniture had honed it to something close to a sense. She read rooms the way other people read weather. And Krebb’s compound this morning read like a storm coming in.

The first thing she noticed was more guards on the gate. Two where there was usually one, and both of them straight-backed and alert rather than the usual bored slouch of males counting the hours till their relief. They waved her handcart through with barely a glance because she was still invisible, still nobody, but they were watching the road behind her. They were watching the road and the sky and even each other with the particular watchfulness of males who’d been told someone important was coming and hadn’t been told when.

Inside the receiving yard the wrongness thickened. The kitchen where she normally handed off the dull grey stew to a surly under-cook and turned straight around was in an uproar. Real crates were stacked along the wall, insulated ones with the seals still bright and unbroken. The under-cook, Resh, was arguing with another servant over a manifest, his voice high and harried.