Page 3 of C is for Captive

He’d ended up here because of a mistake, and he made himself think about it, because a male who lied to himself about his mistakes made them twice.

He’d been chasing the ghost of his mother for twenty years. Twenty years of ports and rumors and dead ends, of leaning on dockworkers and paying informants and trying to find the thin cold trails that Aurelians left in the galaxy when they left any trail at all. Silver eyes, someone would murmur in a bar three systems over. A female who could touch the old machines and wake them. He’d cross half the sector on less than that. He’d built a whole life out of following whispers about the mother who’d walked away when he was eleven and never come back.

This time the whisper had had teeth. A network, quiet and well-funded, buying and moving things that had no business being bought or moved. Precursor fragments, most of them. But also, more than once, rumors of people, people with specific traits—traits that might have been Aurelian—sold on to someone who paid well and asked no questions. The trail had tightened and tightened until it pointed here, to Port Rusk, to a warehouse behind Krebb’s compound that showed up on no legitimate manifest.

So he’d gone in after the records. That was the mistake. Not the going itself, but the arrogance of his attempt. He’d walked onto cargo ships and infiltrated worse-guarded holds a dozen times, and he’d assumed this would be one more. He’d found the office, found the sealed data records, and found three times the security a simple smuggling network should have. They’d been ready. They seemed to have been waiting, and that alone told him he’d stumbled onto something bigger than pilfered relics.

They’d brought him down with a dart, in the end, not a fist. Something engineered and fast-acting, a paralytic that locked his enormous body up in seconds and dropped him where he stood. He’d woken chained to the floor of this cell with a collar around his neck and four bruised guards looking at him like he was a bomb that hadn’t finished going off.

He’d decided, in that first hour, to let them keep thinking it.

Let them think he was broken. That he was some stupid slab of Tuori muscle that had wandered where it shouldn’t and could be squeezed for a ransom or sold for a price. Or, best of all, that he was dangerously unstable, an animal that might come apart at any moment. He fed each theory in turn. A growl here. A sudden strain against the cuffs that made them jump back and reach for their shock-prods. A long blank stare that gave them nothing at all. Males who thought him a beast asked beastly questions, and beastly questions told him what they were afraid of.

The interrogations had been sloppy, run by frightened underlings who let too much slip between the pain. He’d learned that they answered to Krebb, and Krebb answered to someone more important. He’d learned there was a patron, spoken of in the hushed voice males used for money or worse. Someone who paid well for the precursor fragments passing through Krebb’s hands.

But the artifacts weren’t the only things Krebb’s people had been searching for. There had been references to individuals as well. Questions about bloodlines and unusual abilities. The kind of thing an Aurelian carried in every cell. The kind of thing his mother had and might have passed to him, sleeping under his skin.

They don’t know why I’m here.

He was almost certain of it. If they’d connected him to the records he’d tried to steal, the interrogations would have been considerably more focused. Instead they saw a Tuori brawler who’d wandered where he shouldn’t. Muscle and horns and a temper. A good candidate for the fight pits, perhaps, if they couldn’t find someone else to pay for him.

They had no idea what he’d actually been looking for. He intended to keep it that way.

He considered his options carefully, the way he considered everything. He could attempt to break out tonight. He could flee over the wall and be gone before the compound woke, and take the memory of the data records he hadn’t managed to read out into the dark with him, and keep chasing the whispers.

Or he could stay. He could gamble that the patron’s interest would eventually pull the patron closer. He could let them bring him up out of this hole to whatever waited above, closer to the records and the network and whatever answer might sit at the center of it. An answer with his mother’s name written somewhere inside.

Staying was madness. Staying meant more current through the collar, more careful days of hunger and playing dead. He’d endured far worse for far less on the search for his mother.

The light buzzed again. Water trickled from the ceiling into the unseen drain, slow and patient, and he matched his breathing to it. For one last time before he had to set it aside, he let himself think about the clean warm scent that had come and gone through the cell door.

A female. Hidden in plain sight, in the middle of a place that bought and sold people like her for parts.

Whatever she was doing in Port Rusk, she was doing it scared. He’d smelled that too, under the road-dust and the oily camouflage, the sharp note of fear when he’d lifted his head and let her see him thinking. He’d frightened her. He hadn’t meant to, and the fact that he cared at all was its own small, unwelcome surprise.

He sighed and closed his eyes, filing her away with everything else he was waiting on, and settled in to be underestimated a while longer.

CHAPTER THREE

The bowl sat almost full, a brown skin covering the cold stew, and Amy’s first thought was that the prisoner had decided to starve himself. She crouched down to collect it and set the fresh bowl in its place, and that was when she noticed the marks on the floor. Old scrapes, the kind a metal bowl made when someone dragged it towards himself an inch at a time. He’d reached for it and hauled it as far as the restraints allowed, and the restraints hadn’t allowed much.

She looked at his wrists again, and her stomach turned. The cuffs were bolted low and short, forcing his enormous arms down and out at an angle that would have wrenched a smaller body apart. He could bend forward. He could stretch his fingers out. But to actually lift a bowl to his mouth and eat like a person and not an animal lapping from the floor, he’d have had to fold himself in half and put his face down into it. The bruised skin under the metal told her he’d fought the geometry of it and lost.

Nobody had thought to move the bowl closer until she’d automatically placed it there the day before. Nobody had cared whether he ate at all.

“They really don’t want you around long, do they?” she muttered before she could think better of it, then shot a quick glance back over her shoulder. The guard, a different one today, was concentrating on his smoke-stick with the unhurried air of a male who had nowhere better to be and ignoring her.

She dragged the old bowl away and pushed the fresh one in until it nudged his fingers. His eyes tracked every motion. She felt the weight of that silver stare the whole time, patient and unblinking, and it made the back of her neck prickle.

“Not that it’s my business.” She wiped her hands on her trousers. “It’s not. I just bring the food. What happens after that is⁠—”

She stopped. He hadn’t moved. He hadn’t made a sound. But she was beginning to understand that his silence wasn’t empty—it was packed to the brim with something she couldn’t name, and something about that silence made her want to fill it with noise.

“You don’t talk. That’s fine.” She rocked back on her heels. “I don’t blame you. Half the people around here aren’t worth the breath. The other half you’re better off not talking to at all.”

Something changed in his face. Not much. The corner of that hard mouth barely shifted, and a light came up behind the silver of his eyes, quick and warm and gone again just as fast. Amusement. He’d understood every word.

The realization landed low in her chest and stayed there, uncomfortable and thrilling at once. She’d told herself that she’d mistaken that flash of awareness the previous day. She’d told herself that the enormous battered male chained to the floor was exactly who the guards said he was. A beast. A slab of muscle. A creature that growled because growling was all he had. She’d talked at him just to fill the silence, but the whole time he’d been listening and apparently he found her amusing.