Page 8 of C is for Captive

He’d let her go. It had cost him more than the spear had.

You are becoming a fool, he told himself, and knew it for truth, and could not make himself care.

He’d spent twenty-five years making sure he was never a fool like this. The Tuori loved the way they fought—with everything they were. He’d watched it his whole childhood. His father, seven and a half feet of scarred warrior who could break a male’s neck without changing expression, had gone soft and low and gentle every time Brannik’s mother came into a room. His mother was small and quiet and silver-eyed, an Aurelian in a house of giants, but his father had orbited around her like a moon around a world, arranging his whole enormous life around the space she occupied.

And when she’d gone, his father had lasted six months.

Six months of a house going quiet and cold. Six months of the big male sitting at the window with the light dying out of him a little more each night. And then one morning his father had crouched down to Brannik’s level, put that huge hand on the back of his skull one last time, and said I have to find her, son. I can’t stay in a world she’s not in. My brother will keep you until I bring her home.

His father hadn’t brought her home. He hadn’t come home at all.

That was what love did to a Tuori. It hollowed him out and made him helpless and then, when the one you’d built yourself around vanished, you walked off the edge of the world after them. Brannik had watched it happen and sworn, with all the bitter certainty of an abandoned eleven-year-old, that it would never happen to him. He’d made himself into the opposite of it. He’d sealed himself into silence, letting no one near enough to matter, moving from port to port and ship to ship and never once staying long enough to grow roots.

That solitude had held for twenty-five years. And then a small brown-haired female who wasn’t even the same species had knelt on a filthy floor and torn her own shirt to bandage his wrist, and the structure that had held for a quarter-century had gone soft at the seams.

Danger, the watching part of his mind said, dry as ash. The real danger isn’t the restraints or the patron. It’s her.

He was still turning the thought over, when he heard boots in the corridor. Two sets, walking with the deliberate, unhurried pace of males who had all the time in the world and wanted you to know it. He let his shoulders drop, let his head loll forward under the curtain of his hair, and let his breathing go shallow and vacant. He was the dull beast, the half-broken male who growled and lunged and understood nothing. He’d worn the mask long enough that it settled over him effortlessly as the door groaned open.

“Still alive.” Krebb’s lieutenant Vashen, the one with the burn-scarred jaw and the flat eyes, came in first. The drug-runner followed, the sallow twitchy male who handled the paralytic doses, a case in his hand. Brannik knew that case. It had a needle in it and a vial of the stuff that turned his body to dead meat while leaving him wide awake inside it. “Patron said keep it breathing. Didn’t say keep it comfortable.”

He didn’t lift his head. He let a low sound roll out of his chest, the aimless warning growl of a caged animal, and had the small cold pleasure of watching the drug-runner flinch back a full step.

“Easy,” Vashen said to the runner, the way you’d steady a nervous male near a bad-tempered pack beast. “Those restraints would hold five of him. Don’t wet yourself.” But when he crouched down, he stayed a full body-length away, well outside Brannik’s reach as he studied him with those flat eyes. “You know what I keep coming back to? All that fight in the warehouse. Three of mine on the floor, two of them not getting up right. And then nothing. Days of nothing. You sit there and growl and you don’t try the restraints once.” A pause. “A dumb beast doesn’t stop trying. A dumb beast rubs its own hands off fighting the metal.” His gaze dropped deliberately to Brannik’s wrist and the folded strip of clean cloth knotted there.

He kept his breathing slow and his eyes half-lidded and empty. But behind the mask, everything in him went still and cold, because the fool had noticed the cloth and a fool who noticed things was a fool who might start noticing her, and that could not be allowed to happen.

“Doesn’t matter.” Vashen straightened, losing interest, the thought sliding off him the way most thoughts slid off males like him. “Kitchen brat probably felt sorry for the animal. Point is—” he snapped his fingers at the runner, who came forward with the case, hands unsteady— “patron’s coming. And you might not be as dumb as you’re pretending to be.”

He didn’t move. He didn’t so much as twitch a finger. He’d seen this moment coming since he’d heard the talk in the corridor. The patron’s arrival was changing the rules, and Krebb’s people were getting nervous. They wanted to know what they had in the basement before they put it on display. They wanted to make sure it wouldn’t surprise them. And they were too stupid to realize that asking questions of a thing you thought was an idiot was the surest way to get an answer you weren’t prepared for.

The needle came out, but he remained still. He let the runner’s shaking hands find the big vein in the side of his throat, and he let the runner inject him, knowing immediately that it wasn’t as strong as the dose that had felled him. But he let the false slackness come over him, and behind it his mind stayed as sharp as a filleting knife.

“There.” Vashen watched the drug take. “Now. Let’s talk about your eyes.”

There it is.

“Tuori don’t have eyes like that.” Vashen crouched again, closer now that the drug was in, peering at him with the confidence of a male looking at something safely leashed. “You know who has eyes like that? I didn’t. I had to ask around. Aurelian is what I heard.” His scarred mouth twisted. “They’re supposed to be extinct. But the patron pays a fortune for rumors about old blood. Strange abilities. Species that shouldn’t exist anymore. And your eyes are a lot more than a rumor.”

He held his slack, drugged silence, and thought about his mother’s eyes, the one gift she’d left him. Those eyes had caught the light in that warehouse and that’s why he was still in this cell. It would have been almost funny if it weren’t so bleakly stupid, because they had it wrong. Whatever the Aurelians were rumored to do, he’d never done it. He’d never felt a glimmer of whatever impossible thing his mother’s people were supposed to carry in their blood.

He was half Tuori, and the Tuori half was the big, brutal, obvious one. The silver in his eyes was a freakish inheritance and nothing more. His captors were holding a prize that didn’t exist. Their patron was going to arrive expecting something special and find a scarred cargo hand with a dead female’s eyes.

He should have felt relief. He didn’t. Because he’d found a hint of the answer he’d been chasing for years, and it turned his stomach cold.

The patron collects Aurelian blood. His mother had been a full Aurelian. His mother had vanished out of a life she’d loved, away from a mate she’d been besotted with and a son she’d touched with gentle hands, and she’d never returned. He’d spent his adult life following the rumor of Aurelians from port to port, and the rumor had led him here, to a network that hunted people like his mother and sold them to a buyer who wanted what was in their blood.

He’d walked into this warehouse looking for records of Aurelians. He’d never let himself finish the sentence that came after. But it finished itself now, in the cold clear space the drug had made in his skull.

What if she didn’t come back because someone took her?

The thought threatened to knock him down with a force that had nothing to do with the paralytic. For twenty-five years he’d carried the certainty that she’d walked away—that he hadn’t been enough to keep her, that his father hadn’t been enough, that they’d both been abandoned by a quiet silver-eyed female who’d wanted something else more than she wanted them. He’d built himself around that certainty the way his father had built himself around her. And now a scar-jawed thug crouched a body-length away, gloating about his patron’s collection, cracked the certainty straight down the middle.

Answers. The one thing he’d wanted for a quarter of a century. The patron who searched for Aurelians might know. He might know where they came from and where they went. He might know whether one particular silver-eyed female had ever passed through his hands, and if so, whether she’d been dragged.

He had to meet this patron. He’d been willing to sit chained in this cell for days precisely so he could meet this patron, and now he wanted it more than he wanted the air the drug was slowing in his chest.

But something had changed since he’d made that plan. Someone had knelt down and tended his wounds with her small bare hands and rewritten the whole calculation without knowing she’d done it. Because the plan had always ended the same way. He’d get the patron in reach and break the restraints they were so proud of. He’d get the answers he wanted and turn the room into wreckage and leave over the bodies. Simple. Clean. He’d done versions of it before. A male alone could always get out.