Page 24 of C is for Captive

“You flew.” A corner of that sensual mouth curled up. “First flight. Not bad.”

A laugh tore out of her, high and cracked and edged with tears, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stop it from turning into hysterics. Because it was over. Whatever came next, this part was over. No chains on the wall. No guards in the corridor. No pot to carry, no makeup to hide behind, and no eyes to slide away from. For the first time in four years there was no one in the world watching her except the one enormous, bloodied, half-dead male slumped against a ladder, and she didn’t mind him watching at all.

She got up out of the too-big chair on legs that felt like rubber.

The hauler’s forward space had a cramped sanitation unit with a spigot and a scarred metal basin bolted to the wall. She investigated it because she needed something to do. When she turned the spigot, cold water gurgled out over her fingers. She looked down at those fingers and saw the dull grey stain she reapplied every morning and realized she didn’t have to do it anymore.

She didn’t consciously decide to do it, but she cupped the water and pressed it to her face. The water ran off her chin the wrong color, muddy and false, swirling away down the basin, and she scrubbed again, and again, until the water ran clear. Her own skin looked back at her from the scratched metal mirror bolted above the basin, pale and soft and hers. She saw a face she’d deliberately stopped looking at, and it was like seeing a stranger.

She pulled off the outer tunic next, the big shapeless one that covered her head and hung to her knees and turned her into a bundle of cloth. She dragged it over her head and dropped it on the deck and stood there in the thin shirt beneath it for a long moment. Then she reached beneath the shirt and unwound the bindings she’d wrapped around herself every morning for four years. She reached up and unwound the wrap that covered her hair, and worked her fingers into the tight braid, and shook it loose.

Her hair fell down around her shoulders, thick and crimped from the braid, and longer than she remembered because she never really let herself see it. She stood aboard a stolen ship in the middle of nowhere, a woman again for the first time in four years.

She stepped out of the small unit and saw Brannik staring at her. He’d used whatever last measure of strength he had to lift his head. His eyes moved over her uncovered face and her loose hair and the shape of a body that had been hidden for years. She felt every inch of that gaze traveling across her skin, and she went hot and cold at once. Her arms started to come up to cover herself before she caught them and made them stop.

“Don’t—” She didn’t know how to finish it. Don’t look. Don’t stop looking. “It’s just me. I’m sorry, I’ve been him for so long, I don’t even really⁠—”

“Beautiful,” he said, his voice rough and quiet and absolutely certain, dragged up out of a body that had nothing left. Her heart did a somersault in her chest.

And then his eyes rolled back. His arm slid off the pipe, and that huge body sagged back against the wall and went still, and this time when she said his name he didn’t answer.

She stood alone in the humming cockpit, her hair loose around her bare face, a massive unconscious warrior wedged in the doorway beside her, and a stolen ship carrying them both at impossible speed through a river of light between the stars, headed for a destination she wouldn’t learn until they came out the other side. The enormity of it pressed down on her, and for a moment the urge to shrink was so strong she started to wrap her arms around herself again. But then she looked at the silent, battered form of the male who had let her think he couldn’t speak and had turned himself into a weapon for her sake, and the urge passed. Shrinking was for yesterday.

She still couldn’t really move him, but she managed to get him turned enough that he didn’t look like he’d been poured into the hatch. Getting him anywhere else was impossible, so she made him as comfortable as she could, rolling her abandoned tunic into a pillow for his head. She cleaned the raw wounds on his other wrist as best she could with another strip torn from the hem of her shirt. The chains were gone, but the injuries remained.

She tended to him, her hands gentle, as the ship hummed its steady rhythm around them. In the quiet, she could finally really look at him. She could look at the long, powerful lines of his body and the thick muscle of his thighs. She pushed all of his hair back to reveal a face that was all hard angles and a jaw that could have been cut from stone, softened only by the absurdly sensual curve of his lower lip. He was all raw power, even in unconsciousness, a force of nature that had been contained and was now loose.

She didn’t know how to heal a wounded warrior twice her size and from a completely different species, but she knew the basics of how to care for someone. She cleaned all of the injuries she could reach. Then she wet another strip of cloth with water from the sanitation unit and bathed his face. She sat with him on the floor of a ship she couldn’t fly and she listened to him breathe, and she waited.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Something cool moved across his brow, and Brannik came up out of the dark the way he’d learned to as a boy—silently and all at once, taking stock before he let anyone know he was awake.

Soft hands. Amy’s scent lingering in the air and a rag that smelled of clean water. The hum of an engine through the deck at his back. No chains at his wrists. That last fact took him a moment to believe, and when he believed it his whole body relaxed a little.

He opened his eyes. She leaned over him with a strip of wet cloth in her hand and her hair down. He’d thought, dimly, before the dark took him, that he’d dreamed that part. He hadn’t. Loose brown waves fell around her uncovered face, and her skin was her own now, pale and warm-toned instead of the mottled grey disguise she’d worn. The thin shirt she wore revealed the shape she’d hidden beneath layers of cloth and binding, and she was looking down at him with her whole self showing for the first time.

He lay still and let himself look at her from beneath his lashes while she thought he was still asleep.

“I can see your eyes moving,” she said, not lifting hers from the cloth. “You’re terrible at pretending to be unconscious for a male who was out cold for six hours.”

“Six hours?”

“Give or take. I don’t know how to read the ship’s clock.” She pressed the rag to a raw line at his temple, and he let her, even though it stung. “You’ve got a cut here that’s going to scar. You’ve got about forty others that already have. Whoever they had working on you did a—” Her breath caught, and her voice went flat and careful. “They weren’t gentle.”

“No.”

She sat back on her heels and looked at him properly, and the fear was there, banked but not gone, and under it something harder. She’d flown a ship she’d never touched through a portal she’d never seen. She’d earned the hardness.

“I want to know what’s going on,” she said. “All of it. I’ve been sitting here for six hours watching you bleed on a ship we stole, headed for a destination we don’t know, and I don’t even know who you are. Not really. So.” She set the cloth down in the basin. “Talk. And this time I know you can.”

He pushed himself up to a sitting position. It cost him. Every muscle in his back had knotted around the bruises while he lay unconscious on the hard metal floor. His head swam and his wrists throbbed where the restraints had eaten into them, but he got himself upright against the bulkhead and sat there breathing until the cockpit stopped tilting. She watched him do it without offering to help, which he was grateful for, but her hands were half-raised in case he fell, and the concern in that gesture made his chest ache.

He was not a male who explained himself. He’d made silence into armor at eleven and he’d worn it so long it had grown into his skin. But she’d fed him by hand in a cell. She’d cleaned his wounds with strips torn from her own clothing. She’d flown him out of that place when she could barely stand.

She had bought the right to his words, and more than that—he found he wanted to give them to her.

“My mother was Aurelian,” he said, and she nodded.