Page 49 of C is for Captive

The Aurelians let him gather himself. They seemed to be a patient people, unhurried, allowing a stillness that would have driven a hall full of Tuori mad within the hour. His mother sat back at last, wiping a shaking hand across her face, and looked at him. She looked at the scars, the marks the restraints had worn into his wrists, and the battered map of the years between them.

Then her gaze moved to the female under his arm, and softened.

“And this one,” his mother said. “You hold her like she is made of the last light in the world, and you have not said a word about who she is.”

Amy went still, and he felt her breath catch against his side.

“She’s mine,” he said.

He didn’t think about it. It came out of him the way true things always came out of him, without permission, without softening, in the fewest possible words. Mine. His arm tightened around her shoulders as he said it, as if he needed that touch to make it real.

His mother smiled, and beneath that smile he saw the face of a female who had lived through the same thing and knew every stone of the road. She understood completely and instantly. Everyone seemed to understand it faster than he had.

But Amy did not smile.

She tipped her head back and looked up at him, and her hazel eyes had something in them he couldn’t read—and he could read her, he had made a study of reading her across a filthy cell for weeks. He knew the language of her expressions, but this one he didn’t know. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t the old shrinking. It wasn’t anger. It was some quiet complicated thing that was gone before he could name it, but it left a cold thread of unease trailing through his chest, and he didn’t understand why.

Mine, he’d said, and something in her face had flinched at it, and he didn’t know why. He hated not knowing.

“Ah,” his mother said gently, watching them both. “You look at her exactly the way your father looked at me.”

He turned his head.

“I mean that as the highest compliment I have to give,” his mother said. “Garmek was the fiercest male I ever knew. He terrified everyone who met him. And when he looked at me—” Her eyes glistened again. “It was the same way you are looking at her right now. Like the rest of the galaxy is adrift, and she is the only solid ground.”

“His father used that word too,” his mother added, gently brushing Amy’s hand. “At first I hated it. I thought he meant I belonged to him. Eventually I understood. Garmek never meant that I was his possession. He meant that he was mine. Completely. Tuori males are not always skilled at explaining the difference.”

Amy’s throat moved. She looked at his mother, and then up at him, and the unreadable expression on her face cracked open just slightly around the edges.

And he understood, sitting there on a cold stone bench after finally finding what he’d spent his life chasing, a truth so plain he should have grasped it long ago.

He had crossed the galaxy for this moment. For his mother’s face. For the answer at the end of the long dark road. He’d told himself for twenty-five years that when he found her, the hole inside him would finally close and he would be at peace.

And he’d found her. She was alive and she loved him and every question was answered. The old wound had changed shape at last.

But the peace inside him hadn’t come from her.

It had come days ago, in a stolen ship, when a small brave female washed the paint from her face and trusted him enough to stop being invisible. It had come every night since with her breathing against his chest and her hand curled over his heart. She had given him peace, and she’d been giving it to him since the day she first walked into his cell terrified and unbreakable and refused to leave him hungry.

He’d been so fixed on the road ahead that he’d never once turned around to see that he’d already arrived.

He looked down at her, and he must have had the thunderstruck realization written across his face, because his mother made a small pleased sound. He opened his mouth to finally, clumsily, say it⁠—

“You should know the rest,” Ishala said.

The old Aurelian had come silently back down the hall while Brannik wasn’t watching, and now he lowered himself onto the bench at the head of the table with the care of great age. His brilliant silver eyes moved from Brannik to Amy and back, and there was no unkindness in the interruption, just the weariness of a male who had carried a heavy knowledge for a long time and needed to share it.

“You came here because of the Grorn,” Ishala said. “So you already know some of what they are. But you should know what we know. Because you brought it up the mountain with you whether you meant to or not, warrior, and it changes things.”

He reluctantly forced his mind to turn from the female under his arm to the events outside the valley, but he kept his arm where it was. He would not let go of her for this. He’d found he could not let go of her for anything.

“Tell me,” he said.

“The Grorn seek the Vault,” Ishala said. “You know this much?”

“I have heard tales,” he admitted. “But I always assumed it was more legend than truth.”

“The fact that it exists is truth, although what is inside it, none living can say for certain. The Grorn believe it is a divine promise to remake the galaxy in their image. We believe it is precursor technology, from before even our records begin, sealed by our ancestors. Both may be true.” His long fingers folded together on the table. “But what is also true is that whatever is there is hidden behind a lock that requires seven separate keys to open. Not keys of metal. Keys of blood. Seven bloodlines. Seven living lineages, each carrying the marker that answers one of the seven locks. Without all seven, the Vault cannot be opened. The Grorn have spent generations hunting them.”