Page 14 of C is for Captive

“And if he isn’t one?”

“Then the priest takes his sample and we’re paid regardless, and one dead prisoner is no loss to anyone. Now stop wringing your hands and see that the east room’s fit for a priest of the Grorn, because if he arrives to find it wanting you’ll be the one offered up as a sacrifice to his god.”

Boots scraped and she moved, fast and silent, before either of them came to the door. She slipped past the opening in a single breath and disappeared down the passage, her heart hammering against the bindings across her chest. She clutched the bowl to her middle, her head full of words she didn’t understand.

Keys. Bloodlines that wake the machines. Aurelian blood. A priest of the Grorn.

None of it meant anything to her. But she was sure, somehow, that it meant everything to him.

The guard on the cell was one of the sullen regulars. He kept craning his neck down the corridor towards all the unusual noise, plainly resentful at being stuck babysitting the beast while something interesting happened somewhere else. He barely glanced at her. “Feed it and be quick. Whole place has gone mad today.”

“Mad how?” she risked, her voice flat.

“Above your station, that’s how.” But he was already turning back towards the noise, and he opened the door lock without looking at her and jerked his chin at her to go in.

The cell swallowed her in its cold and its dark. Her warrior was chained against the wall as always, but the moment the door opened his head came up and his silver eyes found hers. Something in her chest that had been fisted tight since she’d heard Krebb talking suddenly relaxed. He was still here. He was still safe.

She’d braced herself for shame, for the awkwardness of the kiss and the weight of the morning-after. But she didn’t feel ashamed. She looked at his battered face and those bright silver eyes and every ache from the dream came rushing back, but none of it mattered next to what she’d heard. She crossed the floor and knelt close to him, the way she’d learned she was allowed to be close, and she didn’t reach for the food.

“Something’s happening,” she said quietly. “The whole compound is in an uproar. They’re bringing in fresh meat and the wine Krebb only breaks out when he’s scared of somebody. Servants have been preparing a room since first light. Everyone’s on edge.” She watched his face. “Someone’s coming. Someone important. Today, or soon.”

His stillness changed. She’d learned to read his stillness the way she’d learned to read everything else, and this was a new kind. This wasn’t the patient waiting of a male in a corner, but the coiled attention of a male who’d heard a thing he’d been listening for for a long time.

She leaned closer.

“I had to go through the east passage, past Krebb’s rooms. I heard him talking.” She swallowed. Her voice dropped lower, until it was barely more than breath. “He said things I didn’t understand. Something about Keys and bloodlines that can wake machines. Old blood. He also said that your eyes prove your Aurelian heritage. He called you the specimen.” He had gone rigid, every muscle in that enormous body locked tight, but she pressed on. “He said the person coming is going to test you. That if you’re a Key, Thressk will pay him. A lot, from the way he talked about it. And if you’re not, they take a sample and you’re—” Her voice failed and she had to clear her throat twice before she could make herself finish. “He said one dead prisoner’s no loss to anyone.”

The growl that started in his chest was so deep she felt it in her bones, a subsonic sound that raised the hair on her arms. Then he caught it and cut it off because the guard was just beyond the door. But his eyes had gone from watching to burning. He surged as far forward as the chains would take him, close enough that she felt the heat rolling off of him, and he stared into her face with an urgency that had nothing patient left in it at all.

“You know who’s coming,” she whispered. “Don’t you? You’ve been waiting for this. That’s why you’re still here. I think you could get out of those chains. You’re not what they think you are. You’ve been waiting.”

He held her eyes. And slowly nodded once. The same whole-answer nod he’d given her yesterday. Yes. Every word of it. Yes.

Her heart was pounding so hard she was sure he must be able to hear it. Above them the compound continued with its frenzied preparations. A priest of the Grorn was coming to test her warrior’s blood. She had survived the past four years by never once putting herself in the path of anything dangerous. Now she knelt in the cold cell and made a choice that undid all of it.

“Tell me what you need,” she breathed. “Whatever it is. I can go places you can’t. I hear things. Nobody looks at me.” She reached out, not to his face this time but to the raw wound of his wrist, gently placing her fingers over the strip of cloth she’d tied there days ago. “Let me help you.”

Those silver eyes searched hers and for one long moment something warred in them, want and refusal fighting each other. His free hand came up. It closed over hers where it rested on his wrist, warm and enormous and shaking, very slightly, with the force of whatever he was holding back.

“No,” he growled.

CHAPTER TEN

The word came out of Brannik before he’d decided to let it, and she nearly tripped over the bowl of food. It rocked on the floor, stew sloshing up the side, and she steadied it without ever taking her eyes off him. Those hazel eyes had gone huge in the gloom, brown and green and wide as a child’s, and he felt the mistake settle into his gut like a swallowed stone.

He’d spent what felt like endless days in this cold cell being exactly what they thought he was—a beast, a broken thing, a specimen too stupid or too mad to be worth guarding closely. He’d swallowed his own voice because silence was the one weapon no one had ever been able to take from him. He’d meant to stay silent until he had a plan that got them both out of this place alive.

But she’d walked in with the answers he’d been bleeding for. Keys. Bloodlines that wake the machines. A priest of the Grorn. Answers he’d chased across multiple systems and multiple ports, and she’d carried them to him with a bowl of food because a distracted cook had sent her down the wrong corridor. She had stumbled into the center of something that had killed males far more careful than she, and then she had knelt in front of him with her fingers on his wrist and offered to go deeper.

That was what pulled the word out of him. Not want, but fear. A cold, unfamiliar fear that had nothing to do with his own skin. Because he’d seen what happened to people who went looking. And the thought of her small, stubborn, quick-eyed self walking into that type of danger unlocked something in him he’d kept bolted shut for twenty-five years.

She was still staring at him.

“You can talk?”

He looked at her. He did not answer. It was, he judged, an extraordinarily obvious question. He had already demonstrated the answer in a single syllable, and repeating himself was a waste of the voice he’d only just decided to use. He held her eyes and let the silence do the confirming.

He watched her process it. He watched the shock crack and the color come up her throat and saw the exact moment the fear turned into something else. Something hotter and angrier. Her jaw set. Her fingers, still on his wrist, curled into a small fist against his skin.