Page 32 of C is for Captive

Her eyes were bright and hard, not with pity but with something closer to fury on his behalf.

“And then you grew,” she said.

“Then I grew.” A dark satisfaction filled him at the memory. “All at once, the way Tuori do. Fifteen, sixteen, and suddenly the runt was taller than the males who’d spent years teaching me my place. Suddenly all those techniques I’d learned because I was small, I could use with my father’s strength behind them.” He met her eyes. “They stopped tormenting me. They started being careful around me instead. And they hated that even more.”

“What made you leave?”

He was quiet for a long moment. This part he’d told no one, ever.

“One of them—my cousin, the worst of them—said something about my mother.” His voice dropped, and even now, years removed from the incident, he felt the old rage stir. “He said she’d run off. That she’d never been taken, never been lost. He said that she’d looked at what she’d whelped and been so ashamed she’d abandoned us both. That my father had died chasing a female who never wanted to be found. That I was the leavings of a coward who couldn’t stand the sight of her own son.”

She didn’t speak, but her hand tightened around his.

“I nearly killed him,” he said honestly. “I had him on the ground and my hand was around his throat and I felt it start to give under my fingers, and I understood, in that moment, exactly what I was. What I could do. What I’d become while they weren’t looking.” He drew a breath. “I stopped. I don’t fully know why. Perhaps because if I’d finished it, they’d have been right about me and right that my mother had bred a monster. So I stopped. But they saw my face, and they knew. They knew if I stayed, one day I wouldn’t stop.”

“That’s why you left.”

“That’s part of why. But it was also because I was tired of wondering. I wanted to know where she was and why she left. That’s when I started searching for answers.” He looked up. “So I took a working passage on the first ship that would have me, and I never went back, and I’ve been chasing that light down every rumor in the galaxy for twenty years.”

The ship hummed around them, quiet and constant. She sat with his hand in both of hers now, her head bowed over it, and when she lifted her face there were tears standing in her eyes and she made no move to hide them.

“You were eleven when your mother left. Your father followed her six months later.” Her expression softened. “You were still eleven, Brannik. You were a child.”

“Yes.”

“Brannik.” She said his name the way she’d said it in the cell, the way that had broken something open in him the first time, just his name, spoken because she wanted to say it. “I’m so sorry. For all of it.”

“It’s old.” He turned his hand and threaded his fingers slowly through hers, careful of the claws, watching how small her hand looked compared to his. “I don’t tell it for pity.”

“I know. That’s not what this is.” She rose from her side of the little table, and she didn’t turn to the seat beside him. She walked into the space between his knees, so their faces were on the same level for once. Then she pushed the hair away from his face with both hands, and held it there, looking at him. “That’s not what this is at all.”

He went very still.

The night before, she’d frozen, and he’d let her go without a heartbeat’s hesitation, because her no mattered more than his own hunger and always would. He’d meant every word of it. He’d have waited months. Years. However long it took, even forever, if forever was what she needed.

But this was not the day before. He saw the steadiness of her breath and the deliberate press of her body into the space between his knees. She wasn’t flinching away from him. Her old fears weren’t circling. She’d heard the worst of him, the runt and the beast and the boy who stopped speaking, and she hadn’t stepped back. She’d stepped in.

“Are you certain?” he asked, his voice rough.

“I’m certain.” She said it without a tremor. Her thumbs traced the hard line of his cheekbones, along the edge of a scar. “Yesterday wasn’t fear of you. I need you to know that. It was four years of everything else. And you saw it, and you took your hands off me before I even understood what I was feeling, and no one has ever—” Her voice caught, steadied. “No one has ever cared what I wanted. Not once since I was taken.” She leaned forward until her forehead rested against his, careful of the horns, breath warm against his mouth. “I want this. I want you. I’m choosing you. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” The word sounded like it had been dragged from the bottom of his soul. “I understand.”

“Then don’t wait anymore.”

He kissed her, and there was nothing but the two of them and the quiet hum of the ship and the openness of space around them, and he took his time. He rose from the seat and she made a small startled sound as he lifted her. She weighed nothing, she weighed less than nothing, and he was terrifyingly aware in every moment of exactly how easy it would be to hurt her and how completely he would not.

Because that was the discipline forged in a training ground that meant to break him—to hold enormous strength and let none of it slip. He’d never had a reason worth the effort before. He had one now.

He carried her to the berth and set her down on it like something that might shatter, and followed her down, bracing his weight on his forearms, keeping the crushing mass of himself lifted away from her small body. She reached up and pulled him closer, impatient with his caution, and he let her draw him just so far and no further, and she laughed against his mouth at his stubbornness.

“I won’t break,” she whispered.

“I’ll be certain of that.”

“Brannik.” She got her hands in his hair and made him look at her. “I told you. I’m choosing you. That means I trust you.”

He didn’t answer her, but his hands went to the hem of her shirt, and when she nodded, he lifted it gently over her head. Her trousers followed, and then she was naked beneath him, all the softness and curves she’d spent four years hiding open to his gaze. His body went painfully hard, but he ignored it. She was watching him, and what mattered was that she saw nothing in his face but exactly what he felt.