Page 16 of C is for Captive

She broke away first, gasping, her forehead dropping to his, her fingers still clutching his shoulders.

“Brannik,” she breathed a third time, soft and unsteady against his lips.

He’d spent twenty-five years believing there was nothing worth breaking his silence for. Apparently he’d been wrong.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

He can talk.

The knowledge filled Amy’s head as she fled the cell, her mind racing faster than her feet. Her mouth was still humming and her heart still slamming against her bound ribs like a fist on a locked door. Brannik can talk. His name had a taste, and she could still feel the heat of it on her lips.

He’d been able to talk the whole time, every silent day she’d knelt there prattling at him like a lonely fool, and he’d chosen not to. That made his performance even better than she’d realized. She’d nearly bought it herself, and she was better at reading people than almost anyone in Port Rusk.

And if his silence was a choice, then⁠—

I’m sure you could get out.

She’d seen it in his face when she’d said it. Not surprise, but confirmation. He was choosing to stay, chained in the cold and half-starved and tortured by their interrogations, because whatever was coming was worth more to him than his own skin.

She was going to get the answer out of him. She didn’t know how yet, but she was. Bit by bit, the way she’d coaxed him into eating and coaxed the first word out of him without even meaning to. She had time and she had patience and she had the one thing no one else in this compound seemed to have, which was his⁠—

Boots.

The sound came around the far bend of the passage and froze her mid-step. Not the loose, bored shuffle of the cell guards, but a hard, purposeful cadence. She heard two sets of feet, and two voices, one she knew and one she didn’t.

Krebb.

She was too late to avoid him. The corridor offered nowhere to hide. A low ceiling, a run of sweating stone, and a shallow alcove that wasn’t deep enough to hide a child, let alone a person. She did the only thing there was to do. She pressed her back flat to the wall in the alcove’s meager shadow, dropped her chin so the hood swallowed her face, and hunched her shoulders down and in until she was nothing—a bundle of rags, a nobody kitchen boy waiting to be forgotten. She’d made herself disappear a thousand times. She let the familiar stillness settle over her like water over her head and she stopped breathing loud enough to hear.

The two males rounded the bend, and she studied them from under her lashes. She knew Krebb from a year of deliveries to the compound. She knew his size and the heavy ridges of his face and the small mean eyes that skated over servants without registering them. He wore his good coat, the one embroidered with pure gold thread, but he wore it without his usual arrogance. His hands kept moving, almost wringing.

The other one made Krebb look small. She’d heard the Grorn mentioned before, whispered in the shadows, but nothing she’d heard had prepared her for the size of him. He wasn’t quite the size of Brannik, but he was tall enough that he had to stoop under the low ceiling. Grey scaled skin, mottled like weathered stone, was drawn tight over a heavy reptilian frame. When the dim light caught his face she saw his eyes were solid black, edge to edge. There was no white, no color, nothing to read. Even though Krebb had called him a priest, he wore a dark fitted uniform. And on his shoulder, worked in pale metal, a fanged skull insignia seemed to watch the corridor along with him.

“—assured me the specimen is intact,” the priest was saying. His voice was low and smooth and cool, unhurried, a voice that had never once in its life needed to be raised. “You understand my concern, Krebb. Your methods are not gentle.”

“He’s whole.” Krebb’s voice came out oily with reassurance. “Maybe bruised a little, but nothing that matters. The eyes are what you wanted, and the eyes are⁠—”

“The eyes are what your males saw.” A dry pause. “What I want is what runs beneath them. The bloodline does not live in the color, Krebb. It lives in the blood. And blood can be spoiled by careless handling.”

“He’s fed, he’s⁠—”

“We shall see.”

They were almost level with her now. She kept her eyes on the floor, on the toes of the priest’s boots, and she made herself into a stone.

Don’t look up. Don’t move. I’m the wall. I’m nothing. I’ve always been nothing, that’s the whole trick of it, I’m⁠—

She felt him look at her. She didn’t see it because her eyes were on the ground, but she felt it, like a draft from an open door at her back. A cold, penetrating attention fixed on her and stayed. Every survival instinct she owned screamed at her to keep her chin down and she kept it down, but she couldn’t stop the shiver crawling up her spine.

He didn’t slow his steps. He didn’t speak to her. But as he passed, close enough that she caught the dry cold-reptile smell of him, she felt that black gaze travel down over the hood, the loose shapeless coat, the hunch of her shoulders, and the too-slight frame beneath the too-large clothes. It wasn’t the way males had looked at her before, on the ship, in the bad time she’d worked so hard to bury.

There was no desire in his look. It was worse than desire. It was the flat, unhurried assessment of a male reading a label on a jar. He was cataloguing her and filing her away under some heading she couldn’t see.

For one long, horrible second she was certain he saw straight through the disguise she’d hidden inside for four years. She was certain he saw the woman beneath the disguise, saw the whole of her laid bare in the dark.

Then he passed. The boots went on. The cold attention lifted off her back all at once, and she nearly sagged.

“…the room adequate?” Krebb asked, farther off now.