Page 6 of C is for Captive

Two voices came down the corridor now, arguing about labor.

“—both loading bays cleared by end of the day, he said. Both. You want to be the one telling him it’s not done?”

“I’m just saying it’s short notice.”

“It’s because the patron is coming. And when the patron gives notice you don’t get to say it’s short notice. You get it done or you get gone.” A pause, the scrape of a boot. “Krebb’s beside himself. He had the upper floor scrubbed twice. He was even talking about trying to make the horned one presentable.”

“Presentable.” A low ugly laugh. “Is that what we’re calling it? Because there’s no way I’m getting into that cell and trying to clean up that animal.”

“You will if Krebb orders it. Word is he’s planning to show him to the patron.”

He didn’t move. He kept his breathing slow, his shoulders slack, and his face set in the blank mask of a creature too dull to follow speech. But inside, everything had gone bright and cold and still.

The patron’s coming.

This was the reason he had let them chain him and starve him and believe he was an animal. The mysterious hand behind this network, the one buying precursor artifacts and collecting reports about unusual species and abilities. He still didn’t know how those things connected, but after years of chasing Aurelian rumors across a dozen worlds, he’d learned not to ignore coincidences. The patron might be the one who knew something about a female with silver eyes who had walked out of an eleven-year-old boy’s life and never walked back.

He had waited for this. He had bled for this. Everything in him should have narrowed to a single blade’s edge of purpose. Instead, he found himself thinking of a delicate wrist and a snatched piece of bread and a low tired voice calling him a big idiot.

When the patron came and he finally stopped pretending and tore this place apart, there would be violence, and there would be no gentle way through it. What would happen to the small kitchen worker who walked into this building every single day carrying food and a secret and a scent of fear she could not hide from him? What would happen to her when he was free?

The question filled his mind, and Brannik, who had planned this escape a hundred ways and never once accounted for another living soul, found for the first time in years that he did not have an answer.

CHAPTER FIVE

The grain-dark bread was the wrong texture. Amy figured that out on the sixth day, watching him work his way through it with the resigned patience of a male eating gravel. She’d eaten before leaving the restaurant this time and made sure he knew it so he wouldn’t stare her into eating half. Apparently a male didn’t need words to be unbearably bossy.

She’d started paying attention to what disappeared and what didn’t. The fake protein slop he never touched, not once, and she’d stopped bringing extra of that. The regular bread he ate but slowly, and the dense grain heels he ate faster, and the strip of roasted marsh-fowl she’d smuggled inside her sleeve the previous day he’d eaten in three bites and then looked at her with an expression she was sure meant more of that.

“You’re a meat eater, aren’t you?” she muttered, crouching to swap the bowls. “A big carnivore. All the plants in the world and you want the marsh-fowl.”

He didn’t answer. He never answered. But the silver eyes shifted from her face to the bowl and back, and there was a meaning to them that she’d learned to translate, and the translation this morning was something close to obviously.

It had crept up on her, the satisfaction she found in communicating with him. She hadn’t decided to look forward to it. She’d never once looked forward to walking into Krebb’s compound, where the guards watched her the way males watch anything smaller than themselves. And yet somewhere in the last handful of days the delivery to the cell had stopped being the worst part of her morning and become something else. Something she caught herself thinking about while she kneaded dough. Something that made her tuck a strip of fowl into her sleeve without quite admitting why.

She told herself it was pity because they were starving a chained male, and she knew what it was to be property. She understood what it was like to depend on the mercy of people who’d bought you. It was a reason she could live with. But it was not the whole reason and she knew it, and she pushed the knowledge down where she kept everything else she didn’t look at.

“So.” She settled back on her heels while he ate, keeping half an eye on the doorway where the guard, a lanky Ordanian who kept sneezing, leaned against the wall and tossed a pair of dice from hand to hand, sniffling. “Do you want to hear about my morning or would you rather sit there being mysterious?”

His eyes flicked to her face and she took that as permission.

“There’s this customer. He comes in every third day, sits at the corner table, and orders the stew.” She kept her voice low, pitched under the guard’s wet, miserable sneezing. “Every single time he sends it back. Too salty, not salty enough, the broth’s too thin, the broth’s too thick. I don’t think he actually cares, he just likes sending it back and making Pelloq run around, which makes me run around.” She rolled her eyes. “This morning he says the meat’s tough. It’s not tough. I braised it half the night. So I take it back and I stand in the kitchen and I count to ten and then I bring him out the exact same bowl. I didn’t touch it. I just set it right down in front of him again.”

She paused for effect.

“He ate the whole thing and told Pelloq it was the best stew he’d had all week.”

A low, rough sound came out of the huge male against the wall, more felt than heard, a vibration in the chest. For a moment she froze because she’d heard him make sounds like that before and they’d all meant danger, back off, I could kill everyone in this room⁠—

But this wasn’t that. She looked at his eyes and it was not that at all. The silver had gone bright with amusement. There was no other word for what she was looking at. The hard, sensual line of his mouth hadn’t moved, but his eyes had crinkled at the corners and warmed straight through, and the low sound rolling out of him was not a threat. He was laughing.

“Oh, you think that’s funny.” She pointed a finger at him, and the outrage in her voice was mostly performance and they both knew it. “You would. You’d probably send the stew back too, just to watch me suffer. Big stubborn—” The word idiot died in her throat because the amusement in his face had shifted into something that made her stomach do a slow strange somersault, and she looked away first, busying her hands with nothing.

The stomach thing was new, but she didn’t examine that either. She’d gotten good, over the past four years, at not examining things.

Ignoring the heat threatening to rush to her cheeks, she reached for the old bowl, and that was when she saw his wrist.

The dull grey metal of the industrial restraint sat wide and heavy just above his hand, and beneath the lower edge of the cuff the bronze skin had worn away. It wasn’t a scrape. It was a raw weeping wound, dark where the blood had dried and darker where it hadn’t, his flesh rubbed open by metal and time and the slow endless friction of a body too big for the space he was chained in. She could see where he’d tried to hold his hand at an angle that spared it. She could see it hadn’t worked.