Page 7 of C is for Captive

Something hot and furious rose in her chest, and underneath the fury something worse, something that felt like a hand closing around her throat, because she knew what she was about to do and she knew it was stupid. She was going to get within arm’s reach of a chained Tuori warrior, a male who’d put down several armed males before they dropped him with drugs. Every instinct she’d sharpened over four years of staying small and staying safe screamed the same single word at her, and the word was no. And she knew she was going to do it anyway.

She glanced at the door. The Ordanian had turned half away, one finger pressed to a nostril, working up to another sneeze.

She moved slowly, the way you’d move towards a wounded animal, her palms where he could see them. She watched his face the whole time for the flare that would tell her she’d misjudged this, that he was exactly what they thought he was and she was about to die on a filthy floor for an injured wrist.

Instead, he went still. Not the ordinary stillness he wore like a coat, but totally still. Every enormous line of him froze and the breath went shallow in that vast chest, his silver eyes fixed on her with an intensity that pinned her where she knelt. He did not pull the wrist back. He did not lean away. He held himself as motionless as stone, and she understood, in a rush that made her fingers tremble, that he was holding still for her. He was making himself small in the only way a male that size could so she wouldn’t be afraid.

The realization sent something spearing through her chest that she didn’t have a name for.

“Idiot,” she whispered, and this time it came out soft and small. “Why didn’t you… You can’t reach it to keep it clean, can you? You just sit here and let it⁠—”

She stopped and took a breath. Behind her the guard finally gave an enormous sneeze and swore, and she used the cover of the sound to reach beneath her outer garment and grip the inner hem of her undershirt. The fabric tore with a small ripping sound, and she came away with a long strip of relatively clean cloth that she tucked into her hand.

“Hold still,” she breathed. “I mean it. Don’t make me regret this.”

She dipped a corner of the cloth in the water bowl and brought it to his wrist. His skin was hot. Even through the damp cloth, the warmth of his skin ran up her arm the instant she touched him, deeper and more alive than she’d braced for. She wiped the dried blood away with a care she hadn’t used on anything in a long time, seeing the tendons stand out in his forearm where he held the muscles rigid to keep from twitching. His forearm was thicker than both of hers together. Both her hands wouldn’t meet around his wrist.

“There.” Once she’d cleaned away the blood, she folded the cloth and worked the clean part beneath the lower edge of the restraint, easing the metal off the wound so it rode on fabric instead of flesh. “It’s not much. But it’ll keep it off the worst of it. Stop moving your hand so much and maybe it’ll⁠—”

As she drew back, her fingertips brushed the underside of his wrist. Her bare skin on his with no cloth between them. Awareness went through her like a current down a wet wire.

She’d been doing her best to think of him as a problem to solve. A wound to clean, a mouth to feed, a chained male she pitied. And in one heartbeat the lie collapsed. He was simply there, close enough that his heat radiated against her front, close enough that she could smell the warm musk under the blood and the grime, and close enough that the sheer size of him crashed over her.

The breadth of his shoulders filled her whole field of vision. The pulse under her fingers was slow and powerful, a great engine of a heartbeat that made her own feel like a bird’s. His thigh was a hand’s width from her knee. The short black horns, the long dark hair, the sheer heat of him—and beneath it all, unmistakably, a male, a presence so overwhelming that her breath caught and her fingers stalled against his skin and she forgot, for one suspended second, who she had become.

She had not felt like a woman in four years. She had bound it down and covered it up and smudged it out and forgotten it on purpose. Now she knelt with her hand pressed to the wrist of the most dangerous male she’d ever met and her whole body remembered with a low, sweet ache in her belly that horrified her.

His eyes had changed. The silver had darkened. He was looking at her hand on his wrist and then at her face and there was nothing dull in his gaze, nothing broken or animal. There was a male looking back at her and seeing her, seeing her under her disguise, and the look went through her like a streak of lightning.

She snatched her hand back.

“That’s done. It’s done.” Her voice came out wrong, too high and too fast. She fumbled the bowl and got to her feet too quickly so that her head swam. “Keep it clean. Or don’t. Whatever you… I have to get back.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t reach for her or growl or do a single thing but sit there against the wall and watch her retreat with those dark silver eyes. Somehow that was worse. Somehow the fact that he let her go made her heart pound harder than if he’d tried to stop her. She backed to the door, nearly colliding with the sneezing guard, and fled up the corridor with the empty bowl rattling in her unsteady hands and the ghost of his heat still burning across her fingers.

She didn’t slow until she was through the compound gate and out in the crowded stink of the port, and even then, with the whole familiar squalor of Port Rusk pressing in around her, she could still feel the slow strong pulse under her fingers, and the way, for one ruinous second, she had not wanted to take her hand away.

CHAPTER SIX

The cloth was still knotted at Brannik’s wrist. He hadn’t touched it. He’d held his arm at the same careful angle all through the long dead hours after she left, making sure the padding remained in place, keeping the small folded strip between the metal and his ruined skin. He was aware, with the part of his mind that stood back and observed, that his father’s clan would find the behavior absurd. He’d fought through worse than a rubbed wrist. He’d fought through a spear buried in his side once, on a mining moon whose name he’d forgotten, and hadn’t slowed down enough to bleed properly until the other male stopped moving.

But he did not remove the cloth. Because she had tied it there.

She touched me.

He kept coming back to that the way a tongue keeps finding a broken tooth. The food had meant something. The food had told him she’d looked at him and seen a living being that needed feeding, and that alone had already lodged in him somewhere he’d meant to keep sealed. But the food she could hand over from a safe distance. She could set the bowl down and step back and never come close enough to be in danger.

This time she’d come close.

He’d smelled the fear on her the whole time. He wasn’t such a fool as to miss the sharp bright edge of it in her scent, and he’d heard her heart hammering a small quick frantic drum against her ribs. She’d been afraid of him. She’d known exactly what he was, known it better than the fools who guarded him, and she’d come to him anyway. Slowly, with her palms open, watching his face for the moment he’d turn into what she was afraid of, ready to bolt, and doing it anyway.

She’d cleaned his blood off him with her own hands. Among his father’s people that was not nothing. It was very nearly everything.

You did not touch a warrior’s wounds unless the bond between you gave you the right—kin, or shield-brother, or mate. His father had told him that once, in the low rumbling voice he had spent most of his life trying to forget, back when the telling of such things had still been part of a childhood that had a father in it. We are hard to kill and harder to break, his father had said, one enormous hand cupping his small head, and so we do not let anyone near enough to tend us. When you find the one you let near, you will know. And you will never let them go.

She hadn’t known any of that. She’d knelt down and tended him because his wrist was raw and she was too soft-hearted to leave it untended. She had no idea what she’d done, no idea that the instincts beneath his hard-won discipline had heaved up out of the dark and set their teeth into her the second her bare fingers pressed his pulse.

And that was the problem. Because his pulse had changed under her hand. And he’d felt her soften as well. He’d smelled the fear thinning out and something warmer curling up beneath it, the scent of her shifting in a way that had gone straight through his self-control like a blade through wet paper. He’d sat there rigid as a felled tree, not moving, barely breathing, because if he’d moved he wasn’t certain what he’d have done, and a chained male the size of a cargo hauler had no business finding out what he’d do with a female that small in reach.