Page 19 of C is for Captive

“And the female,” he said. “See that she does not leave this port.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Pell had his back to Amy, shouting at the delivery boy about a crate of soft callafruit, and she took the food cart from its place at the end of the counter and slipped out the back door while he was still yelling.

She knew what he’d say. He’d already said it, three times, in the low hard voice he only used when he was truly afraid. You do not go back there. Not today. Not tomorrow. Let someone else carry the pots. He’d gripped her shoulder with all four fingers and looked at her the way a male looks at something he already suspects he’s going to lose.

She was going back anyway. She told herself it was because of the deliveries, because missing a day would draw Krebb’s wrath, that Brannik had barely eaten yesterday and no one else would bother to bring him food he could actually eat. All of it was true, but none of it was why. The why sat behind her ribs, low and certain and stupid, and it carried her up the familiar alleys towards Krebb’s compound with the handcart in front of her.

The wrongness hit her at the gate. The guard there was one who’d waved her through a hundred times without lifting his eyes off his own boots. Today his eyes came up. They came up and they stayed, sliding down the loose fall of her tunic, and something moved behind them that had never been there before. It wasn’t lust, not exactly, but the slow arithmetic of a male pricing something he’d walked past every day without knowing what it was worth.

They know.

Her stomach dropped like a stone down a well. She kept her steps even. She kept her chin tucked and her shoulders hunched forward in the small shape she’d worn so long it fit her better than her own skin. She made herself keep walking because stopping would confirm his suspicions, and running would be worse.

He let her through the gate. That was almost the worst part. He let her through, and turned his head to watch her go.

Inside, it was everywhere. The two males lounging by the storeroom stopped their talk as she passed and didn’t start again until she’d turned the corner. A third, crossing the yard, actually paused mid-stride. Yesterday she had been furniture. Invisible. The kitchen boy nobody noticed. Today she felt every gaze land on her and cling like a burr, and each one told her the same thing, over and over, a bell she couldn’t stop ringing.

They know what you are.

She unloaded the cart in a kitchen that went silent when she appeared, then headed for the familiar corridor outside the cells. Her hands were steady on the bowl because she’d learned long ago how to keep her hands steady while the rest of her came apart. The guard outside the cells seemed to be one of the few who didn’t know, waving her through with his usual lack of interest. Breathing a silent prayer of relief, she ducked through the door into the dim cell. Brannik was crouching against the far wall, huge and silent, silver eyes already lifted to the door as if he’d been listening for her feet all along.

He looked at her, and his expression confirmed what the guards’ faces had already told her.

“They know,” she whispered.

“They know. The priest told them.” His voice was low, still rough from disuse, and even now the sound of it did something to her she couldn’t afford. “You have to leave, Amy. Not just the compound. The port. Today.”

She set the bowl down harder than she meant to. “And go where?”

“Anywhere they aren’t.”

“That’s not a place.” She crouched in front of him, keeping her back to the corridor and her voice equally low. “You think I have somewhere to go? I have a room over a kitchen and no papers and no credits and a face that would get me sold the moment anyone looks twice. Which they are now doing. Thanks to that priest.” Her voice was shaking, and she hated it. “Pell won’t give me up easily. I’d bet my life on that. But he’s only one male and he doesn’t have the power to stop them. But a runaway with no owner is fair game to anyone who wants to drag me back for the bounty. Do you understand? There is no anywhere they aren’t. I’ve been hiding from people like them for four years and the galaxy is full of them.”

The chains creaked as he shifted, straining towards her the small distance they allowed. “I’ll come and find you.”

“You’ll—” She almost laughed, and it came out cracked. “How?”

“I’ll find you.”

“That’s not an answer, that’s the same words in a lower voice.” She leaned in. “How, Brannik? Where do I go so that you can find me? Where do I go that’s safe? What’s the plan? Because I can’t spend the rest of my life sitting in some hole hoping a male who’s currently chained to a wall keeps a promise he can’t explain.”

His jaw set. His eyes went flat and stubborn, and he said nothing at all, and she recognized that silence. It wasn’t the can’t-speak silence he’d worn for weeks, it was the won’t-tell silence, the one that meant he’d already decided something and he had no intention of letting her weigh in on her own life.

And that was what made her lose it.

“No.” The word came out too loud and she pulled it back to a hiss, but the fury under it didn’t shrink at all. “No. You don’t get to do that. Everyone does that. The males who took me did that. They decided where I’d be and what I’d do and whether I lived. Krebb decided. That damn priest is deciding what I’m worth, like I’m a crate of callafruit. And now you—” She had to stop and breathe. “I trust you. God help me, I don’t know why, but I do, and that is exactly why I will not sit here and be told go, run, I’ll handle it, by another male who won’t tell me the plan. I’d rather be afraid and know than be safe and blind. If I’m going to jump, I decide when. Me. Not you.”

She braced herself for his anger. She’d seen his temper, and heard the growls that rattled the stone, and felt the way the whole cell seemed smaller when the beast came up in him. But it didn’t come.

Instead something crossed his hard face that she had no defense for at all. The stubbornness went out of it. What was left underneath was so raw and so quiet that she forgot, for a second, to be angry.

“Come here,” he said.

She should have said no. She was in the middle of a very good argument about not doing what he told her. But she was already leaning in, because her body had stopped waiting for her permission a long time ago where he was concerned.

He kissed her.