Page 58 of C is for Captive

The kiss started soft. It didn’t stay there. He felt the change in her the way he felt weather coming, her fingers uncurling against his chest and sliding up to the collar of his shirt and her body deliberately leaning into him. He carefully picked her up, three hundred pounds of Tuori warrior lifting a female who came up to his sternum, and she made an impatient sound against his mouth, the same sound she’d made on the ship. The sound that meant stop being so careful, I won’t break.

“The bed,” she said against his lips. “Take me to bed.”

He carried her to it. The alcove was Aurelian-sized, which was to say built for people the size of his mother, and he hit his shoulder on the low stone lintel. She laughed breathlessly, her forehead dropping to his collarbone, and the laugh went through her whole body and into his. He decided that he would happily brain himself on every doorway in the enclave if it kept her laughing like that.

“You’re too big for this room,” she said.

“I’ll build a bigger one.”

“You’d better.” She pulled him down.

He’d learned her by now. He knew that she liked his weight until she didn’t and he knew the difference between the tension of pleasure and the older tension of fear that sometimes surfaced. He’d learned to read her the way he’d once read the moods of his captors, except that reading Amy was the only study he’d ever undertaken purely for the joy of getting it right. He undressed her slowly in the amber light, and she let him, watching his face with those hazel eyes gone dark and soft. There was no disguise hiding what she was. She was just Amy. Just his.

“You keep looking at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like you can’t believe I’m here.”

He pressed his mouth to the curve of her shoulder, to the soft place beneath her jaw, and the frantic pulse in her throat. “I can’t,” he said against her skin, and felt her shiver. Then he stopped talking, because he’d said everything that mattered now, and his hands could say the rest of it better.

She came apart under him with his name on her lips, and he held every ounce of his strength in check even as she urged him past it, even as she wrapped herself around him and told him she trusted him. She urged him closer whenever instinct made him retreat, and he found the fine impossible balance he’d searched a whole life for without knowing it. All that dangerous power was leashed and turned entirely to gentleness, all that violence he’d been feared for was turned into this instead, into the way she gasped and clutched at him and said his name like it was the only word she knew.

Afterwards he lay wrapped around her in the too-small bed, with his arm heavy across her stomach, her back against his chest, and her small warm body fitted into the curve of his enormous one like the other piece of him. Her breathing slowed, and her hand found his where it rested over her heart and laced their fingers together.

“Say it again,” she murmured, half asleep.

He knew what she meant. Once it would have been impossible. Now it came as easily as breathing, all the fear burned away.

“I love you.”

He felt her smile in the shift of her cheek against his arm, and then she slept.

He didn’t. Not for a long while. He lay in the dark in his unused room, in a mountain full of his mother’s people, with his female asleep in his arms, and he waited for the old feeling to come, the hollow certainty that everyone he loved would eventually disappear, that safety was a lie, and that the only sane thing was to hold no one and speak to no one.

It didn’t come.

For the first time in twenty-five years, it simply wasn’t there.

His mother found them in the communal hall the next morning, where Amy had already inserted herself beside the enclave’s cook—a broad mixed-blood Aurelian named Tavek who’d started the meal scowling at the human female touching his pots and finished it laughing at something she’d said. The two of them argued cheerfully about heat and timing over a pan of something that smelled better than anything he’d eaten in years.

His mother watched him watch Amy. She sat down across from him with her tea and said nothing for a while, in the comfortable way of a female who’d known him as a child.

“You look like your father this morning,” she said at last.

“How did he look?”

“Like a male who’d stopped running.” She wrapped her thin fingers around the cup. “There’s a place for you here, Brannik. Both of you. I’ve spoken to the others. You’re one of us—you activated the markers, you have the eyes, you have the blood. You could stay. I have—” Her voice caught, just slightly, the sadness that lived under her surface breaking through for a moment. “I have twenty-five years of you to make up for. I’d like to try.”

He looked at his mother for a long moment. Then he looked across the hall at Amy, at her loose hair and her flushed happy face and her hands moving with total confidence over another person’s stove. He looked at the way Tavek had already started deferring to her without seeming to notice he was doing it. He looked at a female who wanted a door she could open as herself, and a kitchen that was hers, and people who knew her name.

The enclave was safe. It was hidden. It was buried deep in a mountain behind wards only Aurelian blood could pass. It was exactly the kind of place a male built for someone he was afraid of losing. But his father had never done that. His father had given his mother choices, every time, even when every Tuori instinct in him screamed to lock her somewhere safe and stand guard at the door.

“No,” he said.

His mother’s face didn’t fall. It went still, with the same stillness he recognized in himself.

“There’s a settlement,” he said. “Two days out. An independent trade port, on the coast where the river meets the sea. I saw it on the approach and checked the records. It’s a free town where people come and go as they please.” He turned his cup slowly in his huge hands. “She wants her own kitchen, and people who know her name. She can’t have that buried in the mountains. She spent four years hidden. I won’t hide her again, even to keep her safe. Especially to keep her safe.”