Page 9 of C is for Captive

But he wasn’t leaving alone anymore. He couldn’t. The old instinct had its teeth in him now and it would not let him walk out of this compound and off this world and leave the small brown-haired female behind in a place that fed prisoners to collectors and let its guards look at kitchen workers the way these ones did. The thought of the door closing on her and Vashen’s flat eyes turning her way once Brannik was gone and there was no chained animal left to feed was not a thought he could allow. The thought slid off him the way ideas slid off Vashen, and it left a track of something hot and dangerous behind.

She goes when I go. Whatever it costs. She goes.

Which meant he couldn’t simply wait for his moment and take it. He had to make a moment big enough to carry both of them out of it. And he had to do it without her ever guessing what he was about to do because if she knew what he was planning, she’d argue. He was beginning to know her well enough to be certain of that.

“Nothing to say, huh.” Vashen sighed, his little interrogation apparently done. He hadn’t gotten anything out of Brannik—he never did—and Brannik suspected that simple fact had convinced them more thoroughly than any story could that they’d caught something rare and half-feral and worth every credit. “Suit yourself. Won’t matter soon. Patron’ll open you up and read whatever’s in there whether you talk or not.”

Vashen gestured at the runner, who was already backing towards the door, still watching Brannik like the drug might wear off between one heartbeat and the next. “Keep it fed. Keep it breathing. And take that rag off its wrist—I don’t like it. Looks like somebody’s tending it.”

No.

The word went through him with more violence than anything else in the last hour. Not the interrogation, not the possibility of answers, but the casual order to strip the cloth from his wrist. To take away the reminder of the only gentle hands that had touched him in longer than he could stand to count.

He let none of it reach his face. His face stayed slack and empty and drugged.

The runner edged towards him, reaching for his wrist. He let the male get close—let him get his twitchy fingers right up to the knot in the cloth—and then, in the half-second before those fingers closed, he moved his hand. Just barely. A slow drugged twitch, exactly what the paralytic should allow, a mindless animal flinch away from an unwelcome touch. The runner jerked back with a curse as Brannik let his hand fall again, limp and useless-looking. But his hand had turned as it fell so that the wrist with the cloth on it was tucked against his side, half-hidden under the bulk of his forearm. A beast curling protectively around a sore spot.

“Leave it,” Vashen said, already bored, already turning for the door. “It’ll chew your hand off, and you’re no use to me minus a hand. Rag doesn’t matter. Come on.”

The runner went gladly. Vashen followed, and the door groaned shut. The boots receded up the corridor, two males who had no idea they were walking out of a room with a countdown in it.

He sat in the returning quiet, the drug thick and false in his veins, his eyes half-lidded and empty for no audience at all, and let the mask drop by degrees. Against his side, hidden and safe, the folded strip of her shirt lay knotted against his skin. He turned the wrist until he could see the small scrap of grey cloth, the only thing in this whole rotting place that had come to him from a pair of hands that meant him no harm.

He’d been telling himself since he arrived that he was waiting for the patron. That he was waiting for answers to his mother’s disappearance to resolve out of the darkness. All of that was still true. He would have this patron in reach. He would have his answers if he had to take them out of the male one syllable at a time.

But somewhere in the last handful of days, without his permission, something else had climbed above those answers. It was not something he’d chosen and it was not something he could reason his way out of and it was, he was fairly sure, the exact thing he’d spent twenty-five years swearing would never get its teeth into him.

A small female with hazel eyes and a torn shirt was going to walk into this cell tomorrow with food she’d smuggled past the guards. And he was going to have to start working out how to get her out of Port Rusk before a collector of impossible people arrived and started wondering who’d been so tender with the wrist of a chained beast.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The growling reached Amy before she reached the cell door. She stopped in the corridor with the covered bowl balanced on her palm and listened to the low, rolling, unbroken snarl that came up through the floor and into the soles of her feet. She’d heard him growl before—short bursts, warnings, and the odd dry rumble that she’d learned to read as something close to a laugh. This wasn’t any of those. This didn’t stop. It went on and on, a great furious engine of a sound, and under it she could hear the clank of metal dragging against its anchors.

“Wouldn’t go in there today,” the guard by the intersection said. He was one of the younger ones, picking at something under a claw with a blade. “They had another go at it this morning. It’s not happy.”

“It never eats when it’s not fed,” she said, which wasn’t an answer, and kept walking before he could turn it into a conversation.

She’d gotten good at that over the last four years. Say something that sounds like agreement, keep her voice flat and bored and boyish, and move on before anyone looks at her long enough to wonder. The trick was to never let them see her decide anything. Deciding was something that belonged to people who mattered, and her survival was built on not mattering.

But her feet slowed anyway as the growl got louder, and when she reached the cell door she came to a halt. She hadn’t meant to. Her body did it without asking her, some animal instinct flatly refusing to walk into a room with that sound in it. She could see him through the open door, and he was worse than she’d ever seen him. New marks covered every exposed part of his body. There was a gash high on one cheekbone, still wet. His whole enormous frame had pulled taut against the restraints, his shoulders bunched into a wall of muscle, and his hair covered his face so all she could see beneath it was the flash of fangs as he snarled. He looked like every warning she’d ever been given about this place made flesh. He looked exactly like what they had called him. A beast.

For one heartbeat the fear she’d spent days quietly disarming came back all at once, and she couldn’t make herself take the step. But then his silver eyes found her frozen in the doorway, the bowl clutched to her chest and one foot already half-turned to leave. And the growl died.

Not faded or trailed off. It stopped completely, as though he’d reached inside his own chest and closed a hand around the sound. In the sudden ringing quiet she heard her own pulse and the drip of water and nothing else at all. Then he moved, slowly and deliberately folding those massive shoulders down and retreating back against the wall until the chains at his wrists and ankles pulled tight and stopped him. As far from her as the metal would let him go. He pressed his spine to the cold wall and made himself as small as a male of his size could make himself. Then he dropped his gaze to the floor, and went utterly, deliberately still.

Oh, she thought.

The fear left her the way water drained out of a cracked cup, in a sudden rush, and something painfully tender took its place. He’d seen her hesitate. He’d seen her afraid of him. And his answer had been to get as far away from her as his chains allowed and make himself quiet for her. A minute ago he’d been furious enough to bend the wall bolts, and the second she flinched he’d made himself into the safest shape he could manage so that she wouldn’t be frightened.

You great idiot, she thought, and the thought was warm and fond and she was through the door before she’d finished thinking it.

“You can stop that.” Her voice sounded strange to her, too soft, not the flat bored register she used everywhere in this compound. She cleared her throat and tried again. “The tragic hostage act. I’ve seen you glare at a bread round like it owed you money. I’m not scared of you.”

He looked at her from under his hair and there was something in his eyes that made her chest ache. Then she got close enough to see how they’d chained him, and the last of her softness curdled into anger.

They’d shortened everything. Both wrist restraints had been drawn up and locked off against the wall anchors, high and tight, so that his arms were pinned back and up at an angle no body was meant to hold. The ankle chains too. He couldn’t have reached his own knees, let alone the floor. There was an untouched dish in front of him, a full body-length beyond anything he could reach. They’d fed him this morning by putting food where he could see it and know that he couldn’t have it. They’d hurt him. And then they’d left.

“Right,” she said, low and vicious, to the whole rotten place. “Right.”