Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
MAEVE
My mother's hand is cold in mine, her fingers skeletal against my palm, her chest rising and falling in a rhythm that grows slower with each cycle.
I count her breaths the way she taught me to count stars when I was small and the universe was too large to comprehend.
In for four. Hold for four. Out for four.
The numbers are the only thing I can control, the only anchor in a universe that keeps pulling my family under while I scramble for purchase on ground that won't stay solid.
“It's okay. The medication is coming. Hold on a little longer,” I say.
The medication isn't coming. I know this with the certainty of someone who has already lived through this moment a thousand times.
The administrator at the charity clinic told us the waiting list was three weeks long, and my mother had three days at most. The medication exists.
It sits on shelves in pharmacies across Thessaly Station, waiting for people with credits we will never have.
Her breathing hitches. The rhythm I've been counting breaks apart. The sound she makes is wet and horrible and it will live in my ears for the rest of my life.
“Mom.” The word cracks on the syllable, splitting open to reveal the child underneath the girl I'm trying not to be. “Mom, stay with me. In for four. Breathe. In for four, hold for four...”
Her features blur and reform, cheekbones sharpening and skin darkening until it's not my mother anymore.
Corporal Reyes from Kepler IV lies on the charity clinic's narrow bed, his chest torn open by shrapnel that buried itself in his lung, his blood soaking through the field dressing I'm pressing against the wound with hands that have stopped shaking because shaking hands don't save lives.
“Doc.” His words are a wet gurgle that sprays red mist with each syllable. “Doc, am I gonna make it?”
“You're going to be fine.” The lie comes automatically, worn smooth by repetition across a hundred identical moments with a hundred different faces. “Keep breathing. In for four, hold for four...”
His face shifts again. Younger now. Brown eyes that have been getting out of trouble since childhood look up at me with the terror of someone who has realized the game is over and the house always wins.
Tomás.
“Maeve.” His whisper is fading. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”
My brother lies in my arms on a charity clinic bed that has become a battlefield that has become the floor of a holding cell in the Draven compound, and his skin is grey and his breathing is wrong and I'm counting, counting, in for four but the four never comes because his chest has stopped moving.
“No, no, you're not allowed to do this. You're not allowed to leave me too.” The word tears through my throat.
His eyes go glassy. His hand goes limp in mine.
I count the breath that doesn't come.
In for four. In for four. In for...
The scream rips through me and tears free of my throat.
Arms like iron bands close around me.
The world lurches, nightmare bleeding into waking as I thrash against iron restraints. Tomás is dying and someone is holding me down and I need to get to him, need to count his breaths, need to save him the way I couldn't save the others.
“Maeve.”
The word cuts through the chaos, rough and threaded with an urgency that matches nothing in the dream. The arms around me tighten, not crushing but containing, and heat floods through my sleep clothes.
“Maeve. You're safe. Come back.”
Not Tomás. Not the clinic. Not Kepler IV.
The Draven compound. My quarters. And the male holding me against his chest is seven feet of coiled muscle and barely leashed violence, his hearts hammering against my spine.
I go still. His arms don't loosen. One wraps around my waist, pinning me against him with a strength that could shatter bone if he applied it.
The other crosses my shoulders, his hand cradling the back of my head, fingers threaded through sweat-dampened hair.
I'm prey held immobile by a predator, no escape, no leverage, nothing but the mercy of a creature designed to show none.
Terror isn't what floods through me. His scent fills my lungs with each ragged breath, mineral and male, like sun-warmed stone and something deeper underneath.
Musk. Heat radiates from him in waves, seeping into skin that has been cold since I landed on this planet.
Warming places that haven't warmed in years.
“You were having a nightmare.” His mouth is close to my ear, words a rumble I can trace through his chest. “You were screaming and I… I couldn't wake you.”
I should demand he release me. Should maintain distance and professionalism and all the boundaries that exist between property and owner. Instead, all I feel is his palm against my stomach, the way his fingers curl around my hip and the solid wall of muscle surrounding me.
“I'm awake now.” The words come out thinner than I want. The brush of his breath against my neck sends shivers cascading down my spine. “Let me go.”
He doesn't move. For three heartbeats, four, five, his arms stay locked around me and his breathing stays ragged. When he loosens his grip, the separation happens by degrees. Cold rushes in where his warmth retreats.
I scramble backward across the mattress, putting distance between us because his arms felt too good around me. Too safe. Too much like something I could get used to, and getting used to comfort from the male who owns my contract is a trap I refuse to fall into.
The nightmare's grip loosens as waking sharpens my thoughts. He's in my room. In my room, in the middle of the night, because I screamed loud enough to bring him through the door. Not a random nightmare either.
The nightmare.
He saw that. Heard it. Held me through the worst of it while I thrashed against ghosts he couldn't fight for me.
He doesn't go far. The bed dips as he shifts his weight, putting space between us but not leaving, positioning himself at the edge of the mattress with his back to the headboard. His gaze tracks me in the amber light of the night cycle, pupils blown wide, fangs pressing white against his lower lip.
The urge to crawl back across the space between us nearly undoes me. To press myself against that chest and let those arms wrap around me again, let the terror drain away into his warmth the way it did before I remembered who he is. What he is.
I can't afford this. Can't afford to crave the comfort of a male who holds the contract to my existence.
Emotional attachment to my captor is a weakness that will destroy me long before any conspiracy can, but he held me like I was precious.
Whispered my name like it mattered. Called me back from the dark with a gentleness that fits nothing I've learned about House Draven's heir.
The monster might be exactly what the stories say.
Or I’m seeing what lies underneath, the part of him he doesn’t show anyone else.
One question refuses to leave me alone. He stood outside my door, close enough to hear me scream, and came through it when he could have let me suffer.
His arms wrapped around me when walking away would have cost him nothing. None of it makes sense.
The realization crystallizes with a clarity that steals my breath. He didn't happen to hear me. He was already there. Waiting. Listening. The way he has since I arrived.
“Why are you outside my door every night?”
His jaw tightens. The fangs press harder against his lip. The war between what he wants to admit and what he's capable of acknowledging.
“I don't know.” The words sound excavated rather than offered. “I haven't known for some time.”
He's too close. Sitting on my bed in the amber glow of night cycle, watching me with eyes that see too much, making me want things I have no right to want.
The male who terrorizes half of Vahiri Prime looks lost right now, uncertain in ways that don't match his reputation, and I can't afford to find that endearing.
“You should go.”
He doesn't leave. Instead, he shifts his weight and settles deeper into the mattress, his massive frame claiming space like he belongs here, like my bed is another territory he's decided to occupy.
“What was the nightmare about?” His voice is a deep rumble, too good at sinking into my soft centre.
“None of your business.” I pull the sheets higher, aware of how little my sleep clothes cover.
The bed is smaller with him in it, the room contracted around his presence until the walls press close.
He's so much larger than me. Stronger. If he wanted to take what he hasn't asked for, I couldn't stop him.
He hasn’t asked. Hasn’t taken. Instead, he held me through the nightmare rather than using my vulnerability against me.
In the pharmaceutical storage, he kissed me and then fled like he feared himself more than I ever could.
At the Bazaar, a single look was enough to protect me from that Thesskan trader.
I don't think he'll hurt me. Don't think he'll take what I'm not offering.
The problem is that part of me wants to offer.
Part of me looks at this male who has shown me gentleness wrapped in violence and wants to give him pieces of myself I should be protecting.
That wanting is more dangerous than the nightmare that has sunk its teeth into my bones.
The last part of the nightmare is always Tomás.
The part that hasn't happened. Yet. Cold floods through me as realization crystallizes.
Tomás. My brother, the reason I'm here, the debt I'm paying with years of my life.
I haven't thought about him once since that first day.
Haven't asked where he is, if he's eating, if he's terrified or resigned or still hoping his sister will somehow make this right.
I've been so consumed by the investigation and the conspiracy and the male sitting on my bed that I forgot the entire reason I sold myself to House Draven.
“Is Tomás safe?”