Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The grain-dark bread was the wrong texture.
Amy figured that out on the sixth day, watching him work his way through it with the resigned patience of a male eating gravel.
She’d eaten before leaving the restaurant this time and made sure he knew it so he wouldn’t stare her into eating half.
Apparently a male didn’t need words to be unbearably bossy.
She’d started paying attention to what disappeared and what didn’t.
The fake protein slop he never touched, not once, and she’d stopped bringing extra of that.
The regular bread he ate but slowly, and the dense grain heels he ate faster, and the strip of roasted marsh-fowl she’d smuggled inside her sleeve the previous day he’d eaten in three bites and then looked at her with an expression she was sure meant more of that.
“You’re a meat eater, aren’t you?” she muttered, crouching to swap the bowls. “A big carnivore. All the plants in the world and you want the marsh-fowl.”
He didn’t answer. He never answered. But the silver eyes shifted from her face to the bowl and back, and there was a meaning to them that she’d learned to translate, and the translation this morning was something close to obviously.
It had crept up on her, the satisfaction she found in communicating with him.
She hadn’t decided to look forward to it.
She’d never once looked forward to walking into Krebb’s compound, where the guards watched her the way males watch anything smaller than themselves.
And yet somewhere in the last handful of days the delivery to the cell had stopped being the worst part of her morning and become something else.
Something she caught herself thinking about while she kneaded dough.
Something that made her tuck a strip of fowl into her sleeve without quite admitting why.
She told herself it was pity because they were starving a chained male, and she knew what it was to be property.
She understood what it was like to depend on the mercy of people who’d bought you.
It was a reason she could live with. But it was not the whole reason and she knew it, and she pushed the knowledge down where she kept everything else she didn’t look at.
“So.” She settled back on her heels while he ate, keeping half an eye on the doorway where the guard, a lanky Ordanian who kept sneezing, leaned against the wall and tossed a pair of dice from hand to hand, sniffling.
“Do you want to hear about my morning or would you rather sit there being mysterious?”
His eyes flicked to her face and she took that as permission.
“There’s this customer. He comes in every third day, sits at the corner table, and orders the stew.
” She kept her voice low, pitched under the guard’s wet, miserable sneezing.
“Every single time he sends it back. Too salty, not salty enough, the broth’s too thin, the broth’s too thick.
I don’t think he actually cares, he just likes sending it back and making Pelloq run around, which makes me run around.
” She rolled her eyes. “This morning he says the meat’s tough.
It’s not tough. I braised it half the night.
So I take it back and I stand in the kitchen and I count to ten and then I bring him out the exact same bowl.
I didn’t touch it. I just set it right down in front of him again. ”
She paused for effect.
“He ate the whole thing and told Pelloq it was the best stew he’d had all week.”
A low, rough sound came out of the huge male against the wall, more felt than heard, a vibration in the chest. For a moment she froze because she’d heard him make sounds like that before and they’d all meant danger, back off, I could kill everyone in this room—
But this wasn’t that. She looked at his eyes and it was not that at all.
The silver had gone bright with amusement.
There was no other word for what she was looking at.
The hard, sensual line of his mouth hadn’t moved, but his eyes had crinkled at the corners and warmed straight through, and the low sound rolling out of him was not a threat. He was laughing.
“Oh, you think that’s funny.” She pointed a finger at him, and the outrage in her voice was mostly performance and they both knew it.
“You would. You’d probably send the stew back too, just to watch me suffer.
Big stubborn—” The word idiot died in her throat because the amusement in his face had shifted into something that made her stomach do a slow strange somersault, and she looked away first, busying her hands with nothing.
The stomach thing was new, but she didn’t examine that either. She’d gotten good, over the past four years, at not examining things.
Ignoring the heat threatening to rush to her cheeks, she reached for the old bowl, and that was when she saw his wrist.
The dull grey metal of the industrial restraint sat wide and heavy just above his hand, and beneath the lower edge of the cuff the bronze skin had worn away.
It wasn’t a scrape. It was a raw weeping wound, dark where the blood had dried and darker where it hadn’t, his flesh rubbed open by metal and time and the slow endless friction of a body too big for the space he was chained in.
She could see where he’d tried to hold his hand at an angle that spared it. She could see it hadn’t worked.
Something hot and furious rose in her chest, and underneath the fury something worse, something that felt like a hand closing around her throat, because she knew what she was about to do and she knew it was stupid.
She was going to get within arm’s reach of a chained Tuori warrior, a male who’d put down several armed males before they dropped him with drugs.
Every instinct she’d sharpened over four years of staying small and staying safe screamed the same single word at her, and the word was no.
And she knew she was going to do it anyway.
She glanced at the door. The Ordanian had turned half away, one finger pressed to a nostril, working up to another sneeze.
She moved slowly, the way you’d move towards a wounded animal, her palms where he could see them. She watched his face the whole time for the flare that would tell her she’d misjudged this, that he was exactly what they thought he was and she was about to die on a filthy floor for an injured wrist.
Instead, he went still. Not the ordinary stillness he wore like a coat, but totally still.
Every enormous line of him froze and the breath went shallow in that vast chest, his silver eyes fixed on her with an intensity that pinned her where she knelt.
He did not pull the wrist back. He did not lean away.
He held himself as motionless as stone, and she understood, in a rush that made her fingers tremble, that he was holding still for her.
He was making himself small in the only way a male that size could so she wouldn’t be afraid.
The realization sent something spearing through her chest that she didn’t have a name for.
“Idiot,” she whispered, and this time it came out soft and small. “Why didn’t you… You can’t reach it to keep it clean, can you? You just sit here and let it—”
She stopped and took a breath. Behind her the guard finally gave an enormous sneeze and swore, and she used the cover of the sound to reach beneath her outer garment and grip the inner hem of her undershirt.
The fabric tore with a small ripping sound, and she came away with a long strip of relatively clean cloth that she tucked into her hand.
“Hold still,” she breathed. “I mean it. Don’t make me regret this.”
She dipped a corner of the cloth in the water bowl and brought it to his wrist. His skin was hot.
Even through the damp cloth, the warmth of his skin ran up her arm the instant she touched him, deeper and more alive than she’d braced for.
She wiped the dried blood away with a care she hadn’t used on anything in a long time, seeing the tendons stand out in his forearm where he held the muscles rigid to keep from twitching.
His forearm was thicker than both of hers together.
Both her hands wouldn’t meet around his wrist.
“There.” Once she’d cleaned away the blood, she folded the cloth and worked the clean part beneath the lower edge of the restraint, easing the metal off the wound so it rode on fabric instead of flesh.
“It’s not much. But it’ll keep it off the worst of it.
Stop moving your hand so much and maybe it’ll—”
As she drew back, her fingertips brushed the underside of his wrist. Her bare skin on his with no cloth between them. Awareness went through her like a current down a wet wire.
She’d been doing her best to think of him as a problem to solve.
A wound to clean, a mouth to feed, a chained male she pitied.
And in one heartbeat the lie collapsed. He was simply there, close enough that his heat radiated against her front, close enough that she could smell the warm musk under the blood and the grime, and close enough that the sheer size of him crashed over her.
The breadth of his shoulders filled her whole field of vision.
The pulse under her fingers was slow and powerful, a great engine of a heartbeat that made her own feel like a bird’s.
His thigh was a hand’s width from her knee.
The short black horns, the long dark hair, the sheer heat of him—and beneath it all, unmistakably, a male, a presence so overwhelming that her breath caught and her fingers stalled against his skin and she forgot, for one suspended second, who she had become.
She had not felt like a woman in four years.
She had bound it down and covered it up and smudged it out and forgotten it on purpose.
Now she knelt with her hand pressed to the wrist of the most dangerous male she’d ever met and her whole body remembered with a low, sweet ache in her belly that horrified her.
His eyes had changed. The silver had darkened.
He was looking at her hand on his wrist and then at her face and there was nothing dull in his gaze, nothing broken or animal.
There was a male looking back at her and seeing her, seeing her under her disguise, and the look went through her like a streak of lightning.
She snatched her hand back.
“That’s done. It’s done.” Her voice came out wrong, too high and too fast. She fumbled the bowl and got to her feet too quickly so that her head swam. “Keep it clean. Or don’t. Whatever you… I have to get back.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t reach for her or growl or do a single thing but sit there against the wall and watch her retreat with those dark silver eyes.
Somehow that was worse. Somehow the fact that he let her go made her heart pound harder than if he’d tried to stop her.
She backed to the door, nearly colliding with the sneezing guard, and fled up the corridor with the empty bowl rattling in her unsteady hands and the ghost of his heat still burning across her fingers.
She didn’t slow until she was through the compound gate and out in the crowded stink of the port, and even then, with the whole familiar squalor of Port Rusk pressing in around her, she could still feel the slow strong pulse under her fingers, and the way, for one ruinous second, she had not wanted to take her hand away.