Chapter 50
Chapter
Fifty
Kolt
The drink we called sorvek was not made to be savored.
It was made to do a job. It burned going down and settled in the chest like a smoldering coal, and after two tankards, the edges of things softened enough to forget about even the worst pain. I held my third tankard, cupping it in my hands and turning it slowly.
The bar on the lower deck was not crowded at this hour.
A few raiders sat in clusters at the far end, low voices and the occasional bark of laughter threading through the hum of the ship.
This was what I had come for, the buzz of a place that was not my quarters or even my oblek, where the silence was torturous.
I took a long swallow of sorvek and stared at nothing.
She had tracked me down to tell me that none of it had mattered. That was the part I kept circling back to, the part I could not seem to get past no matter how many times I turned the conversation over in my mind.
What happened on Kashara stays on Kashara.
I set the tankard down harder than I intended.
The more rational part of me knew she was right.
We had been thrown together by impossible circumstances.
We had been afraid and hunted and forced into a proximity that neither of us would have chosen under ordinary conditions.
What had grown between us in that hothouse of crisis was not necessarily what it would have been anywhere else.
Feelings could be manufactured by extremity.
Every warrior knew that. You bonded with those you fought beside.
She had simply said what I should have said first.
The problem was the voice underneath all of that logic. You have bled beside other warriors, other allies. You have survived things that should have broken you and come out the other side intact and unattached and exactly as you were before. You have never felt like this before.
Not once. Not for anyone.
I thought about the way she had looked at me in the secret room, the way she'd tended my wound with borrowed theatre supplies, and the way she’d felt pressed to me as we’d slept.
I clenched my teeth at the ache that gnarled my chest. It was dull and throbbing and had nothing to do with my injury and everything to do with Skye.
"You are not drinking that."
I did not look up. I recognized the voice.
Venik settled onto the bench across from me and regarded me with his dark, steady eyes.
"I am thinking," I said.
His brows lifted. "You are changed, battle chief.”
The back of my neck tightened. I looked up and met his eyes directly. “I lost my memories and then regained them. It is an adjustment."
"I was in your debrief," he said. "I know what you lost and what you recovered. That is not what I am referring to."
"Then you are referring to my ability to serve." I kept my voice even. "Which has not changed."
Something moved across his face that was akin to amusement. "I have never once doubted your ability as a warrior, Kolt. That is not what I said."
I dropped my gaze to my drink again.
"You lost your rank, your history, your place in the horde. I have wondered if it changed the way you view the world.”
I reminded myself that he could not know about Skye, as I chose my words carefully. “It was disorienting.”
Venik studied me as the silence between us stretched.
"I saw the way you looked at her," he said. “I watched you watch her walk away.”
My jaw tightened. "Venik."
"I am not accusing you of anything. I am telling you what I observed.
" He laced his fingers together on the table.
"And I am telling you that I know you. You will take whatever you are feeling right now, and you will compress it to almost nothing, and then you will carry it under your armor where no one can see it, and eventually you will convince yourself it was never really there at all. "
I wanted to argue. Actually, I wanted to draw my blade and challenge him to a battle, but that would do nothing to ease the ache in my chest.
"She ended it," I said before I could stop myself. “There is nothing else to be said.”
Venik was quiet for a moment. "You are a Vandar. You fight for what you want.”
"This is different."
"Is it?”
"She is human," I said, and even as I said it, I heard how thin it sounded.
The argument that would have once been enough for me now meant nothing. I did not care if she was human because I knew her. I knew her heart. I knew that she was the opposite of every wrongheaded idea I’d ever heard about her species.
“Wrexxon once felt the same way about humans. I think we can all see that he does not believe what he once did.” He stood.
“I suspect you can relate more than you wish to admit.” He leaned down and rested his palms on the table.
“I am not telling you what to do, Kolt. I am only reminding you that you are a battle chief of the Vandar. You do not give up without a fight.”
Then he straightened and walked away, leaving me sitting alone with the sorvek I still had not finished. My fingers tingled as I turned his words over in my mind.
He was right. I did not shrink from a fight. But losing this one might destroy me.