Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
I’m going to Port Eyeja.
Polly’s words rang in Njkall’s ears as he stared at her. Then he took a step towards her. Very carefully. Very slowly. The way he did everything when the wrong motion might shatter something.
“With Tess,” she continued. Her voice was steady but her hands had tightened against each other, knuckles going white.
“She needs to talk to Baralt. About the ship. We think if she can describe what she saw of the ship, it might help him match it to something so he can track down who had her. Or even where she shouldn’t go once she leaves.
” She took a shaky breath. “She asked me to come with her.”
He watched the set of her jaw, and the slight tremor at the corner of her mouth that she was fighting to hide. Courage sat on her like armor she hadn’t quite learned to wear yet, too big in some places and too tight in others, but it was unmistakably there.
Port Eyeja.
The landing field. The crowds. The narrow streets full of males who looked too long and stood too close and didn’t know her, didn’t know what she’d survived, didn’t know that the wrong glance could send her spiraling back to the cage on the ship that had stolen her from everything she’d ever known. Or the even worse place.
He remembered leading her through the town when she arrived. And he remembered the way she’d pressed so close to his side that he could feel her heartbeat through his fur, pikka-fast and terrified, enduring it only because she trusted him to keep the world at bay.
And now she was telling him she was going back. Not asking. Telling.
Good, he thought, even as his chest tightened with a fear he would not let her see. Good. This is good. This is what I wanted for her.
He just hadn’t expected it to feel like this when she did. Like pride and terror braided so tight he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
“Njkall?” Her voice wavered slightly. She was watching him the way she used to in the early days, searching for a reaction that would tell her whether she’d done something wrong. “Say something.”
He crossed to her and stopped an arm’s length away because he would not crowd her, not ever. Not even when every instinct in him was screaming to pull her against his chest and hold her there where nothing could touch her.
“What do you need from me?” he asked instead.
She blinked. Whatever she’d been bracing for, it wasn’t that.
“I—” She shook her head, a quick uncertain motion. “I thought you’d tell me not to go. Or that it was dangerous. Or—I don’t know. Something.”
“It is dangerous.” He kept his voice calm, the voice he used when she needed steadiness more than answers.
“You know that better than I do. You’re frightened.
I can see it on you. You’ve been frightened since you walked through that door and you’re still standing here telling me you’re going anyway.
” He let the corner of his mouth lift, just slightly.
“Why would I tell you not to do one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen you do? ”
Surprise flickered across her face, followed by something softer, something that made his heart ache in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
“It doesn’t feel brave,” she said. “It feels like I’m going to be sick.”
“That’s what brave feels like. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never been frightened of anything worth fearing.” He tilted his head, studying her. “You didn’t answer my question. What do you need from me, little one?”
She was quiet for a moment, her fingers uncurling. He watched her think and that too was a kind of bravery, the willingness to ask herself what she actually wanted instead of what she thought she should want.
“Come with us,” she said at last. “I don’t want you to hover. I can’t learn to do things on my own if you’re standing in front of every hard thing. But I want to know you’re there. Close enough that I can reach you if I need to. Is that—” She hesitated. “Is that too much to ask?”
“Never,” he said roughly, then softened his tone. “No. I’ll be there. At whatever distance you need. Close enough to reach, far enough to let you breathe. You set the terms.”
Relief washed over her face, followed by determination, fragile but real. She nodded once, quickly, as if she were afraid she’d lose her nerve if she took too long.
“All right. Then we should… We should make a plan. Tess won’t want surprises. Neither will I, honestly.” A shaky almost-laugh. “What does it look like? How do we do this?”
He considered the options.
“We’ll take a sleigh,” he said. “It’s faster than walking, and you won’t have to spend as much time in the cold. I’ll ask Baralt to meet us at his house instead of the enforcement hall. You’ve been there before and it’s quieter there.”
She nodded slowly, following his logic. “And if even that is too much? If I need to leave?”
“Then we leave. Immediately. No questions, no arguments. You say the word and I take you home.” He held her gaze.
“You are not trapped, little one. Not by this trip, not by anything. If you walk into that town and every part of you tells you to leave, then we leave. I will be right beside you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Her voice was stronger now. Still scared, but anchored. “Yes. I understand.”
“Good.” He glanced towards the passage that led to the healer’s cave. “Tess is still with Cera?”
“Yes. She’s ready, I think.” She hesitated. “As ready as she’ll get anyway. She’s angry more than scared, most of the time. Angry is easier than scared.”
He nodded and headed for the door. “Then we’ll go this afternoon. I’ll ready the sleigh and send a message to Baralt. Give me a quarter-hour, then bring her to the main entrance. Can you do that?”
“Yes.”
He paused at the mouth of the passage and looked back at her.
She was still standing where he’d left her, small and pale in the crystal light, and the fear was still on her but so was a kind of fierce fragile hope that made her look, for just a moment, like the female she was becoming instead of the female she’d been.
He wanted to cross back to her. He wanted to cup her face in his hands and tell her she was extraordinary and that watching her grow was the highest privilege of his life and that he would burn the whole Empire to ash before he let anything hurt her again.
He didn’t. He turned away instead, because she needed to do this on her own terms and his wanting could wait. It would keep waiting, as long as she needed it to.
He was halfway down the passage when he heard her footsteps behind him.
“Njkall.”
He immediately turned back towards her. She crossed the distance between them in three quick strides, and then her hands were fisting in the fur at his chest, and she was pulling herself up on her toes, and then—
She kissed him.
Not tentatively but enthusiastically, her mouth opening against his, her fingers tightening in his fur, and her body pressing against him like she was trying to burn the shape of herself into his body.
He felt the heat of her through his pelt and heard the small desperate sound she made against his lips.
His control cracked like ice in the spring thaw.
His hands found her waist and drew her closer before he could stop himself, and gods, she fit against him like she’d been made for the space, like his arms had been waiting his whole life to hold her.
She was still kissing him, deeper now, hungrier, and his blood was roaring in his ears and his claws were sliding out and he wanted—
He wanted.
He pulled back.
It took everything. Every year of discipline.
Every hard-learned lesson about patience and restraint and giving someone room to become themselves.
He pulled back, and he watched her as he did, her face flushed and her eyes dark with something that matched the burning in his own chest, and he made himself let go of her waist even though his hands screamed at the loss of her.
“Polly.” His voice came out wrecked. He tried again. “If you do that again, I’m not going to be the one who stops, little one. And you have somewhere to be.”
She stared at him, her chest heaving. Her fingers were still tangled in his fur and she seemed to have forgotten they were there.
“I know,” she said. “I know. I just needed—”
“I understand.” He reached up, gently, and unhooked her fingers from his pelt.
He held them in his own for a moment and let his thumb trace across her knuckles in a tender promise.
“And I will give it to you. Everything you want, anything you need. But not right now. Not when you’re about to walk into the hardest thing you’ve done in a year.
” He released her hands and stepped back, letting the cool cave air fill the space between them.
“Right now, you’re going to Port Eyeja. And I’m going to be right beside you. And when we come home—”
He let the sentence hang. Let her fill it with whatever she wanted to imagine.
Her cheeks were still flushed. Her mouth was still swollen from his kiss. But she was nodding, slowly, and underneath the desire he could see her pulling the scattered pieces of her courage into something she could carry.
“When we come home,” she repeated quietly.
“Yes.” He smiled at her, and it was the hardest thing he’d done all day, letting her see the gentleness instead of the hunger when the hunger was burning him alive. “A quarter-hour. Main entrance. Don’t be late.”
She huffed out a breath that was almost a laugh. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
She held his gaze for one more heartbeat—long enough for him to see all the want and fear and wild uncertain hope—and then she turned, and walked back towards the healer’s cave, and he watched her go and did not follow.
The sleigh. The message. Baralt. A route that would keep them away from the worst of the crowd.
A dozen details that needed his attention, and he seized on them now like a drowning male seizing driftwood, because if he let himself think about her mouth on his for even one more second he was going to chase her down that passage and pin her against the nearest wall and show her exactly what when we come home meant.
Later. All of it, later.
He turned away and went to ready the sleigh, and his hands did not shake, because he was a clan leader and a warrior and he had spent forty years learning to master himself.
But gods, she made it difficult.