Page 28 of C is for Captive

“Four years ago someone decided where I went and what I was for and I didn’t get a say in any of it. I got sold. I got dumped in a port to die, and when I didn’t die, I got to spend four years turning myself into someone I wasn’t so nobody would notice I was alive.” Her voice shook but she didn’t stop. “For four years, I’ve had other people decide what happens to me. And now you—the one person who never asked me anything—you want to stow me somewhere out of the way and go off without me.”

“To keep you⁠—”

“I know why.” She reached out and put her hand flat against his chest, over the worst of the bruising, and he felt it burning through his battered body like a brand. “I know exactly why, and it’s the best reason anyone’s ever had. But you don’t get to be the only one who makes the choices. Not anymore. Not with me.” Her hazel eyes held his, brown and green shifting in the amber light, and there was no fear in them at all. “You picked me back there. Let me pick you back.”

He looked at her for a long moment. He should argue. Every protective instinct in him howled at him to argue, to overpower her objections, to be immovable the way his size let him be immovable about everything else. He could out-stubborn her. He could refuse. He could set the course himself while she slept and put her down on the first neutral world they passed whether she willed it or not.

And he understood, with a clarity that surprised him, that if he did, he’d lose the only thing he’d ever found that he wanted to keep. The boy who stopped speaking had done it because everyone he loved had decided, without him, to leave. If he did the same to her now, he’d be the one leaving someone behind at a window.

“All right,” he said, and she blinked.

“All right?”

“You’re coming with me.”

He watched surprise and triumph war across her uncovered face, and he had to look away from her because if she saw his face, she’d see how fierce and how deep his pleasure ran. The pleasure that she had chosen him, that she would rather stand beside him in front of the danger of the Grorn than be set down safe and alone.

No one had chosen to stay with him in twenty-five years.

He kept his voice flat and gruff, a warrior conceding a point. “You’ll do as I say if it goes bad.”

“I’ll do as we agree if it goes bad.”

The corner of his mouth quirked up before he could stop it.

“Agreed,” he said.

She sat back, and her hand slid off his chest, and he felt the loss of it. But then she smiled at him, wide and warm and reckless, the first true smile he’d ever had from her, and it hit him harder than any drug they’d put in his blood.

“Good,” she said, and picked up the wet cloth. “Now hold still. I’m not done with you yet.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The panel above the galley bench had been rattling for two days, and on the third morning Amy came in to find Brannik half inside it. He’d wedged his enormous shoulders into a space clearly built for a much smaller crew member, and one arm was buried to the elbow in a nest of wiring while the rest of him was folded into a painful-looking crouch. His horns scraped the underside of the shelf. He didn’t so much as grunt.

“You’re going to break the ship taking it apart,” she said.

“It was already broken.”

“Was it?”

“The coolant line was chafing.” A soft click from somewhere inside the wall. The rattle that had haunted her sleep for two nights stopped. He withdrew his arm, uncurled to his full appalling height, and set the panel back into place with two fingers as though closing a book. “Now it isn’t.”

She watched him wipe grease off his claws with the same rag she’d used on his wounds, and she thought—not for the first time in the past two days—that she had no idea who this male actually was.

She’d known the prisoner. She’d known the silver eyes watching from under matted hair, the still presence of him against a wall, and the terrible controlled violence she’d glimpsed once and hoped never to see again. But this male wandered the corridors of a stolen cargo ship at odd hours fixing things nobody had asked him to fix. He’d rewired a flickering light in the sleeping berth. He’d rerouted the water so it ran hot enough to actually wash in. He’d found a jammed cargo hatch on the second day and stood staring at it as if it were a personal offense until he’d pried it open, and then he’d looked almost content.

She’d never in her life met a creature so large who so plainly needed to be useful.

“Sit,” he said. “You should eat.”

“You cooked?”

“I made food.” A distinction, she’d learned, that mattered.

He set a bowl in front of her, and she looked down at it, and her heart sank the same way it had for the past two days. He’d found the ship’s ration stores—dried protein, packet grains, and other things meant to be boiled into something edible. He had, technically, done that. But what sat steaming in the bowl was grey and glutinous and smelled faintly scorched, and there were hard bits in it that had not been hard when they went in, and soft bits that should not have been soft.

“You burned it,” she said. “And also somehow didn’t cook it.”