Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
The female was afraid of him. Brannik could smell it when she came down the corridor, a thin sharp thread woven through the grease and the damp and the rot of the cells, and yet she kept coming closer.
That was the part he could not stop turning over.
Fear made most creatures retreat. Ever since he’d finally grown into his Tuori heritage, he’d watched it happen.
He’d seen the flinch and the half-step back and the way eyes slid off him and found something safer to look at.
Predators smelled fear and prepared to attack.
Prey smelled of fear and retreated. The small kitchen worker did neither.
Her hands were not quite steady and he could see the pulse beating rapidly in her throat, and still she crouched an arm’s length from a chained Tuori and talked to him.
He liked the talking more than he would admit to anyone, least of all himself.
She thought she was babbling to fill the quiet.
He understood that. But he heard the personality underneath the words, dry and quick and a little tired, the humor of someone who had learned to laugh so quietly that no one noticed.
Half the people around here aren’t worth the breath.
He had almost smiled. He had caught himself before it reached his face, and even so she’d seen it, and the flare of surprise in her eyes had been worth the slip.
He knew what she was doing. He knew it in his bones, because he had done it himself, once, for years.
The clothes were too big on purpose. The hood and the smudged skin, and the way she folded her shoulders in and dropped her chin so the eye passed over her without catching.
He’d done the same thing. Not the disguise, but the intent behind it, the desperate art of taking up less room in the world than your body needed.
He had been the runt among his father’s people, the half-Aurelian child too slight and too pale for a Tuori training school, and he had learned young that the smaller you made yourself the fewer fists found you.
He had learned to be quiet. He had learned to be still.
He had learned that a boy who did not react was a boy the larger boys eventually got bored of.
He recognized the defense in her the way he’d recognize his own reflection in filthy water, warped but unmistakable.
And she was too thin.
The clothes hid a great deal, but not enough, not from him.
Her wrists were ridiculously slender, her bones too delicate, her whole body small enough that some primitive part of him objected every time he looked at her.
She fed a chained stranger from her own pocket when she should have been eating it herself.
She’d set that second round of bread on his tray with her chin tucked and her voice rough, telling him not to make a thing of it, and something in his chest had ached.
So he had made a decision, and once he decided a thing, did not reconsider it.
He ate what he needed to keep his strength and he left the rest. Not the fake protein slop—that he ignored anyway, since it did his body no good and never had.
But on the fourth day she brought a heel of something dense and grain-dark that had actual nourishment in it.
He ate half and no more, and set the rest where it would keep, and waited.
She noticed the next day. Of course she noticed. She noticed everything, this one.
“You didn’t eat it.” She crouched and frowned at the tray, and the frown was real, put out and worried at once. “There’s good bread there and you just left it? Do you know what I go through to get bread that isn’t sawdust? People would fight in the street for this.”
He said nothing. He watched the guard instead, the heavy Ordanian slouched in the doorway picking at his own teeth, and waited until he half-turned towards some noise further down the corridor.
The moment the guard’s attention drifted, he hooked two clawed fingers around the rim of the bowl and pushed it towards her.
She blinked.
“No,” she said. “That’s yours. I brought it for you.”
He pushed it another inch, holding her gaze. He watched the understanding cross her face, this small kitchen worker who read moods for a living, and watched her realize what he meant and reject it in the same breath.
“I’m not—” She sat back on her heels, and her voice dropped so low the guard couldn’t have caught it even if he’d cared to. “I’m not taking food off a prisoner. That’s backward. That’s the whole point of bringing you the food. You eat it because you’re the one they’re starving.”
He didn’t move the bowl back. Instead, he looked at her and let the silence do its work, the way silence always did if a person had the patience to hold it, and he had more patience than anyone she would ever meet.
He looked at her thin wrist and then at her face and then at the bread, slowly and deliberately.
Then he looked at her again and didn’t blink and didn’t look away.
Color rose under the smudged skin of her cheeks.
“You’re impossible,” she muttered. “You know that. You don’t say one word and you’re still the most stubborn—”
He kept looking at her.
“Fine.” She snatched the bread off the tray with a quick furtive motion, glaring at him the entire time as though he’d bullied her into it, which he supposed he had. “Fine. There. Happy? I’m eating your very generous charity. This is humiliating.”
She tore off a bite and chewed it, jaw set, still glaring at him, and something inside him eased.
He watched her eat, and the tightness he’d carried since he first caught sight of those painfully thin wrists loosened a little.
He understood, with a clarity that unsettled him, that he would have sat there and stared her down for an hour if that was what it took to get her to eat.
She finished the bread. She wiped her fingers on her trousers and wouldn’t look at him. When she finally did, there was something raw and vulnerable in her gaze that she quickly buried.
“That doesn’t happen again,” she said. “I bring it, and you eat it. That’s how this works.” She gathered the old bowl and rose. “Big idiot.”
The insult had no weight in it at all. He filed away the sound of it, and the way she said it. Big idiot. He found, absurdly, that he wanted to hear it again. Even more absurdly, he wanted to hear his name on those small, soft lips.
She left. The guard peeled off the doorframe and went with her as far as the corridor’s end, and he leaned back against the stone and let his eyes half close as he listened.
His captivity had given him the ability to listen.
The organization’s people thought him broken or stupid or too far gone to matter, and so they talked in front of him the way a male talks in front of a chained beast, freely and carelessly.
He’d gathered more in this past week than in months of chasing rumors across multiple ports.
Two voices came down the corridor now, arguing about labor.
“—both loading bays cleared by end of the day, he said. Both. You want to be the one telling him it’s not done?”
“I’m just saying it’s short notice.”
“It’s because the patron is coming. And when the patron gives notice you don’t get to say it’s short notice.
You get it done or you get gone.” A pause, the scrape of a boot.
“Krebb’s beside himself. He had the upper floor scrubbed twice.
He was even talking about trying to make the horned one presentable. ”
“Presentable.” A low ugly laugh. “Is that what we’re calling it? Because there’s no way I’m getting into that cell and trying to clean up that animal.”
“You will if Krebb orders it. Word is he’s planning to show him to the patron.”
He didn’t move. He kept his breathing slow, his shoulders slack, and his face set in the blank mask of a creature too dull to follow speech. But inside, everything had gone bright and cold and still.
The patron’s coming.
This was the reason he had let them chain him and starve him and believe he was an animal.
The mysterious hand behind this network, the one buying precursor artifacts and collecting reports about unusual species and abilities.
He still didn’t know how those things connected, but after years of chasing Aurelian rumors across a dozen worlds, he’d learned not to ignore coincidences.
The patron might be the one who knew something about a female with silver eyes who had walked out of an eleven-year-old boy’s life and never walked back.
He had waited for this. He had bled for this. Everything in him should have narrowed to a single blade’s edge of purpose. Instead, he found himself thinking of a delicate wrist and a snatched piece of bread and a low tired voice calling him a big idiot.
When the patron came and he finally stopped pretending and tore this place apart, there would be violence, and there would be no gentle way through it.
What would happen to the small kitchen worker who walked into this building every single day carrying food and a secret and a scent of fear she could not hide from him?
What would happen to her when he was free?
The question filled his mind, and Brannik, who had planned this escape a hundred ways and never once accounted for another living soul, found for the first time in years that he did not have an answer.