Page 20 of C is for Captive

Not like the last time, the bruising crash of his mouth against hers where his restraint had nearly snapped and hers with it. This was slow. He kissed her like he had all the time in the world and no chains, as if the wall he was bolted to had simply ceased to exist. One enormous hand came up as far as the irons let it and his knuckles grazed the line of her jaw with a gentleness that had no business existing in a body that size.

The gentleness destroyed her more thoroughly than the fierce kiss ever had. Her eyes stung and she leaned into him, breathing him in, and for one suspended moment there was no priest and no port and no price on her head, there was only the warm impossible fact of being held.

He pulled back just far enough to speak against her mouth.

“I don’t have a plan,” he admitted quietly. “I just know that if you stay, they will take you. You have to leave before they do.” His thumb feathered across her jaw again. “But I will find you. And when I do, no one touches you again. Not the priest. Not Krebb. Not anyone. I promise you that.”

She let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something wetter. She looked at the heavy irons on his wrists, the padding she’d tied there herself around one of them, and the raw skin above it. She looked at the chain running to the ring in the wall, as thick as her arm.

“You’re chained to a wall,” she whispered.

He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He just looked at her with that steady silver look, as patient as the stone surrounding them, certain of something he had no possible right to be certain of. He held her gaze and did not blink. And the terrible thing, the thing that made her chest ache, was that she almost believed him.

She sat back on her heels. Her heart was still slamming and her mind was still screaming that running meant open ground and no walls. It meant every stranger’s eye looking for her and no locked door at the end of the day. Four years of surviving by staying still, and now he was telling her to move.

“I hate this,” she said quietly. “I want you to know that. I hate running. Staying invisible is the only thing that’s kept me alive and you’re asking me to walk out into the open and be seen.”

“I know.”

“You’re probably right, though.” The words tasted like rust. She made herself say them anyway, because she’d meant what she’d said—she’d rather know than be blind, and knowing meant admitting something she didn’t want to admit. “That priest wants to put a price on me. Krebb’s males are already looking at me like—” She swallowed it. “Staying still isn’t going to work anymore. Staying still is how I’m going to be found. I know it. I hate it, but I know it.”

Something eased in his shoulders. He’d been braced for her to refuse, to cling to the safety she’d built even after it had stopped being safe.

“Tonight,” he said. “After the port sleeps. Take nothing they’d notice missing.”

“I still don’t have anywhere⁠—”

Boots sounded in the corridor, coming closer, the heavy uneven tread she knew far too well.

She grabbed the pot and dropped her head and shrank down over it as she headed for the door. She was still doing it, still trying to shrink herself into a kitchen boy who no longer existed, but she’d only taken a few steps down the corridor when Krebb’s shadow fell over her.

“There you are,” he said in a voice he’d never used with her, warm and pleased and terrible. “I’ve been looking for you.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

There you are.

The words reached Brannik through the low stone corridor, and every muscle in his body turned to stone.

He couldn’t see the mouth that said them. He could only see the small slice of corridor the doorway allowed, the far wall streaked with damp and Amy’s small huddled shape a few paces down it, gone still the way prey goes still. But he saw the shadow fall across her, and knew the shape of that shadow. Krebb.

Then the shadow moved and a hand the size of a shovel came down on the back of Amy’s neck and hauled her up, and the empty pot she’d carried clattered off the stone and rolled, ringing, out of sight.

He didn’t move. Not yet.

He’d spent days not moving. He’d spent days letting them believe the drug still fogged his thoughts, and the chains were the reason he sat quietly against the wall and not the choice he’d made. He had counted the pins in the wrist-locks with the flat of his thumb while she talked to him. He had felt where the ring-bolt sat loose in its socket, and worked it free using his own weight, night after night, slowly enough that no guard would ever mark it. He had a plan. The plan involved the priest, and darkness, and no witnesses, and Amy already gone and safe before the first male died.

The plan died the instant he saw her feet leave the floor.

“Let me go,” she demanded, and it wasn’t the whisper she wore like armor. The voice was loud and clear and hers. “Let go of me⁠—”

“Careful now. You’re worth more without bruises.” Krebb sounded amused as two more sets of boots crowded into the corridor behind him. “The priest wants you clean and calm. So be a good⁠—”

She wasn’t calm. She wasn’t good. She twisted like a caught feline, drove her heel against a shin, raked her nails down a face, and threw her whole small weight against the grip that held her. It went against the quiet careful disguise he’d watched her wield, the shrinking, the making-herself-invisible. This time she wasn’t disappearing. She was fighting. For the first time since he’d known her she refused to vanish, and it was the most beautiful and the most terrible thing he had ever seen.

“Hold her⁠—”

“She scratches⁠—”