Page 59 of C is for Captive

For a long moment his mother was quiet. Then she smiled slowly, the melancholy easing as something proud and aching replaced it.

“That’s exactly what he would have said,” she murmured.

“If she likes the settlement, we’ll stay. But we’ll come back.” He glanced at Amy, and at Tavek laughing again. “She’s already making friends. And if the Grorn ever come back or you ever need someone who can walk your wards and swing a blade, you send word and I’ll be here before you finish sending it.” He set the cup down. “But we’ll build our own place in the light, where people can see her and know her and be glad she’s there. That’s the life she wants, and I want it too.”

His mother reached across the low table and took his massive, scarred hand with her slender, fine-boned one.

“Then build it,” she said. “And bring her back to visit her terrifying mother-in-law often.” Her mouth curved. “I have twenty-five years to make up for. Two days out is close enough for me to be a nuisance about it.”

Across the hall, Amy caught him looking. She lifted a spoon in his direction, triumphantly gesturing at the pan and the no-longer scowling cook and the warm bustle of the morning. She mouthed something that might have been watch this or might have been I love you or might have been both at once.

He smiled back, knowing that his search was over. He wasn’t looking for a place to belong anymore. He was building a home with her.

EPILOGUE

Six months later…

The pot boiled over, and Amy caught it before the whole thing hissed into the flame, sliding it off the heat with a bare hand and a curse that would have made Pelloq clutch his chest. The thought of Pelloq made her smile. She’d written to him a month ago—no details, just letting him know she was safe—and Brannik had arranged for it to be delivered through a series of third parties designed to hide their trail. She knew he’d be happy for her.

“Behind you,” Nesk called, ducking past with a tray of clean bowls balanced on one broad shoulder. He was young, still growing into his four arms, and he treated her small kitchen like the most important place in the settlement. “Table six wants the fish again. The whole thing. Says he’ll pay double if you do the crust the way you did last week.”

“Tell table six the crust was an accident and I’ve been trying to reproduce it for six days.” She wiped her forehead with her wrist. “Tell him I’ll do my best.”

“He won’t care if it’s an accident. He’ll eat it either way.”

He would. That was the thing that still surprised her sometimes, in the middle of a shift, in the middle of the steam and the clatter and the smell of proper food cooking—that people came here on purpose. That they came back. That there was a regular at table six, a grumpy old Vekh freighter captain who’d docked at this settlement forty times over the years and never bothered to learn anyone’s name until hers.

She ran the back of her hand across her forehead again and looked, for a moment, at her hands.

Bare hands. Bare arms. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow because the kitchen ran hot, and there was nothing hiding them, no oversized cloth, no camouflaged skin. Her hair was pinned up off her neck so it didn’t get in the way, not bound flat and crammed under a cap to be hidden. Anyone who walked through her dining room would see a human woman, sweaty and flushed and completely herself, running the best kitchen in a two-day radius.

Four years she’d spent making herself into someone nobody would look at twice. Now people crossed a landing field to look at her.

“Amy.” Nesk again, at the pass, lowering his voice in the way the whole staff had learned to do, half warning and half delight. “He’s here.”

She didn’t have to ask who.

The dining room had gone quieter—not silent, because the settlement wasn’t the kind of place where a big male made a room go silent—but quieter, the particular ripple of attention that always moved through a room when Brannik came into it. She heard the low creak of the floor under a weight it hadn’t been built for. Someone said his name in greeting, and he gave a short grunt in reply, which from Brannik counted as a warm and lengthy conversation.

She came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, and there he was.

He filled the doorway the way he filled every doorway, ducking under the lintel out of long habit, straightening to his full enormous height once he was clear. His black hair was tied back today, off his face, which meant he’d been working. The freight didn’t care about his mystique the way the settlement did. His deep bronze skin had a faint metallic sheen under the lamps. His horns swept back from his temples, and his silver eyes found her across the room the instant he was through the door, the way they always did. The way they had from the very first, when he was a chained male in a filthy cell lifting his head to watch a kitchen worker carry in a bowl.

She stopped, for just a second, and let herself remember it. She did that sometimes. She let herself stand in the middle of her own restaurant, in her own body, in the loud warm light of her own life, and remember the cell. The stink of it. The heavy restraints. The terrifying stillness of him, and the way his eyes had followed her every movement, and the way she’d talked to him because his silence made her nervous, never dreaming⁠—

She hadn’t been able to dream back then because surviving had eaten up all the space where dreams were supposed to go.

Now she had a restaurant, and a Vekh captain who paid double for accidental crust, and a four-armed apprentice who guarded her kitchen like a temple, and neighbors who waved when she passed. She had a mother-in-law who was, in fact, terrifying, and who they visited once a month for Aurelian tea and firm opinions and her way of looking at Brannik like she still couldn’t believe he was standing there. She had a family. She’d gathered one up without noticing she was doing it, the way you gather warmth from a fire just standing close enough, for long enough, that one day you realized you weren’t cold anymore.

Brannik crossed the room to her, and people made way. He didn’t shoulder anyone aside. He’d spent his whole life learning to move his enormous body through spaces that weren’t built for it, and the settlement had learned how to let him. He reached her at the pass, and he didn’t say a word—he wouldn’t, not in a crowded room—but he reached out one huge hand and closed it around her waist and pulled her against him. The tension of the day melted out of her spine all at once, the boiled-over pot and the impossible crust and the double-paid captain, gone.

“You smell like fish,” she said into his chest.

“You smell like home,” he said, quietly, just for her.

She tipped her head back to look up at him. His face was hard and battered and enormous, the same face that had frightened her half to death across a bowl of fake protein. Looking down at her now, something eased at the corners of that surprising mouth that she’d taught herself to read the way other people read whole sentences.

“You said that like it still surprises you,” she said.