Page 57 of C is for Captive

When they finally broke apart she was breathless and shaking and laughing and crying all at once. And behind them, from the doorway of the enclave, came the unmistakable dry sound of Serei clearing her throat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“There’s a room for you,” Serei said, walking towards them as though she hadn’t just watched her son kiss a human female half off the side of a mountain. “I thought you might want it now.”

Brannik set Amy back on her feet, but he didn’t let go of her hand. He was aware of the heat still in his face, of Amy pressed against his side and pretending very hard that she hadn’t been crying, and of his mother’s mild silver gaze taking in all of it and drawing every correct conclusion.

“Mother—”

“I’m not going to say anything.” She turned and began to walk. “I said everything I needed to say yesterday. Come. It’s this way.”

She led them through the enclave, and he followed with Amy’s hand in his and something strange happening in his chest, some warm ache he had no name for. The Aurelian homes were carved from pale mountain stone, the doorways smooth and rounded. The same warm light glowed from within that he remembered from a small stone lamp his mother had kept on Tuor. He thought he’d remembered the lamp wrong for twenty-five years, and then he’d walked in here and seen a hundred of them. A piece of his childhood, scattered through a settlement he’d never known existed.

They passed a communal hall where someone was cooking, and Amy’s head immediately turned towards it, cataloguing the scents. He filed that away. He’d promised her a kitchen. He intended to deliver it.

His mother stopped at a small building near the far edge, where the mountain opened out again and the valley showed through a wide unglazed window in the rock. The room beyond was small and warm with a bed built into an alcove, a low table, and one of the stone lamps glowing amber in the corner.

“It was going to be yours,” his mother said, without looking at either of them. “When we brought you here.” She touched the doorframe, a brief gesture, there and gone. “It should be lived in.”

He didn’t have words for that. He rarely had the words, but this was different—not the deliberate silence he’d worn like armor for a quarter of a century, but the ordinary failure of a male handed something too large to hold. Then his mother looked up at him with the same knot of grief and joy tangled so tightly he couldn’t tell them apart. She reached up and pressed her palm to his cheek one more time.

Then she gave him a dry, knowing, unmistakable look, one eyebrow lifting a fraction as her gaze flicked to Amy and back. For one absurd moment she looked like the mother who used to catch him sneaking sweetened bread and pretend she hadn’t.

“Goodnight, my son,” she said, and left.

The only light that remained was the amber lamp and the last of the dusk in the wide stone window. And it was just the two of them, and the small warm room, and the quiet.

Amy let out a breath. “Your mother,” she said, “is terrifying.”

“Yes.”

“In a good way.” She turned to him, and in the lamplight her hazel eyes were still faintly swollen, her hair loose around her face now that she never needed to hide it. She looked up at him, all five feet, four inches of her, and the impossible tenderness rose up in him, the tenderness that had frightened him so badly in that cell, the tenderness he’d spent days trying not to feel because feeling it made him vulnerable and vulnerability got people killed.

He was done being frightened of it.

“Amy.” He said her name, and even that was hard, because saying anything at all had always been the same as handing someone a knife and showing them where to put it. He made himself do it anyway. “I need to say something. And I’m—” His jaw worked. “I’m not good at this. You know I’m not good at this.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“I do.” He caught both her hands and folded them inside one of his. “You told me you spent four years wanting nothing so nobody could take it from you. I did the same thing with words.” His jaw tightened. “I was eleven when my mother disappeared. Six months later my father left too. I learned that if you say what matters out loud, the universe hears you and takes it. So I stopped saying anything. Silence was the only place that felt safe.”

She went still, her hand flexing within his.

“Then you came into that cell and talked enough for both of us.”

A tiny smile touched her mouth.

“I fought wanting you. I fought speaking to you. I thought both things made you vulnerable.” He raised her hands to his chest and held them there, over the heavy, slow beat of his heart. “I was wrong.”

He held her gaze.

“I looked across a galaxy for a place to belong, and I found it in a cell with a terrified human female.” His throat threatened to close, but he pushed through it. She deserved the words, no matter how much they cost. “I love you, Amy.”

Her breath caught.

“I’ve barely said anything in twenty-five years, so believe me when I say this.” His hands tightened gently around hers. “I belong where you are.”

For a moment she didn’t move at all. Then she made a small broken sound and rose up on her toes, and he bent to meet her because this was how it worked between them, neither one having to reach the whole distance alone.