Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
The cloth was still knotted at Brannik’s wrist. He hadn’t touched it.
He’d held his arm at the same careful angle all through the long dead hours after she left, making sure the padding remained in place, keeping the small folded strip between the metal and his ruined skin.
He was aware, with the part of his mind that stood back and observed, that his father’s clan would find the behavior absurd.
He’d fought through worse than a rubbed wrist. He’d fought through a spear buried in his side once, on a mining moon whose name he’d forgotten, and hadn’t slowed down enough to bleed properly until the other male stopped moving.
But he did not remove the cloth. Because she had tied it there.
She touched me.
He kept coming back to that the way a tongue keeps finding a broken tooth.
The food had meant something. The food had told him she’d looked at him and seen a living being that needed feeding, and that alone had already lodged in him somewhere he’d meant to keep sealed.
But the food she could hand over from a safe distance.
She could set the bowl down and step back and never come close enough to be in danger.
This time she’d come close.
He’d smelled the fear on her the whole time.
He wasn’t such a fool as to miss the sharp bright edge of it in her scent, and he’d heard her heart hammering a small quick frantic drum against her ribs.
She’d been afraid of him. She’d known exactly what he was, known it better than the fools who guarded him, and she’d come to him anyway.
Slowly, with her palms open, watching his face for the moment he’d turn into what she was afraid of, ready to bolt, and doing it anyway.
She’d cleaned his blood off him with her own hands. Among his father’s people that was not nothing. It was very nearly everything.
You did not touch a warrior’s wounds unless the bond between you gave you the right—kin, or shield-brother, or mate.
His father had told him that once, in the low rumbling voice he had spent most of his life trying to forget, back when the telling of such things had still been part of a childhood that had a father in it.
We are hard to kill and harder to break, his father had said, one enormous hand cupping his small head, and so we do not let anyone near enough to tend us.
When you find the one you let near, you will know. And you will never let them go.
She hadn’t known any of that. She’d knelt down and tended him because his wrist was raw and she was too soft-hearted to leave it untended.
She had no idea what she’d done, no idea that the instincts beneath his hard-won discipline had heaved up out of the dark and set their teeth into her the second her bare fingers pressed his pulse.
And that was the problem. Because his pulse had changed under her hand.
And he’d felt her soften as well. He’d smelled the fear thinning out and something warmer curling up beneath it, the scent of her shifting in a way that had gone straight through his self-control like a blade through wet paper.
He’d sat there rigid as a felled tree, not moving, barely breathing, because if he’d moved he wasn’t certain what he’d have done, and a chained male the size of a cargo hauler had no business finding out what he’d do with a female that small in reach.
He’d let her go. It had cost him more than the spear had.
You are becoming a fool, he told himself, and knew it for truth, and could not make himself care.
He’d spent twenty-five years making sure he was never a fool like this.
The Tuori loved the way they fought—with everything they were.
He’d watched it his whole childhood. His father, seven and a half feet of scarred warrior who could break a male’s neck without changing expression, had gone soft and low and gentle every time Brannik’s mother came into a room.
His mother was small and quiet and silver-eyed, an Aurelian in a house of giants, but his father had orbited around her like a moon around a world, arranging his whole enormous life around the space she occupied.
And when she’d gone, his father had lasted six months.
Six months of a house going quiet and cold.
Six months of the big male sitting at the window with the light dying out of him a little more each night.
And then one morning his father had crouched down to Brannik’s level, put that huge hand on the back of his skull one last time, and said I have to find her, son.
I can’t stay in a world she’s not in. My brother will keep you until I bring her home.
His father hadn’t brought her home. He hadn’t come home at all.
That was what love did to a Tuori. It hollowed him out and made him helpless and then, when the one you’d built yourself around vanished, you walked off the edge of the world after them.
Brannik had watched it happen and sworn, with all the bitter certainty of an abandoned eleven-year-old, that it would never happen to him.
He’d made himself into the opposite of it.
He’d sealed himself into silence, letting no one near enough to matter, moving from port to port and ship to ship and never once staying long enough to grow roots.
That solitude had held for twenty-five years. And then a small brown-haired female who wasn’t even the same species had knelt on a filthy floor and torn her own shirt to bandage his wrist, and the structure that had held for a quarter-century had gone soft at the seams.
Danger, the watching part of his mind said, dry as ash. The real danger isn’t the restraints or the patron. It’s her.
He was still turning the thought over, when he heard boots in the corridor.
Two sets, walking with the deliberate, unhurried pace of males who had all the time in the world and wanted you to know it.
He let his shoulders drop, let his head loll forward under the curtain of his hair, and let his breathing go shallow and vacant.
He was the dull beast, the half-broken male who growled and lunged and understood nothing.
He’d worn the mask long enough that it settled over him effortlessly as the door groaned open.
“Still alive.” Krebb’s lieutenant Vashen, the one with the burn-scarred jaw and the flat eyes, came in first. The drug-runner followed, the sallow twitchy male who handled the paralytic doses, a case in his hand.
Brannik knew that case. It had a needle in it and a vial of the stuff that turned his body to dead meat while leaving him wide awake inside it.
“Patron said keep it breathing. Didn’t say keep it comfortable. ”
He didn’t lift his head. He let a low sound roll out of his chest, the aimless warning growl of a caged animal, and had the small cold pleasure of watching the drug-runner flinch back a full step.
“Easy,” Vashen said to the runner, the way you’d steady a nervous male near a bad-tempered pack beast. “Those restraints would hold five of him. Don’t wet yourself.
” But when he crouched down, he stayed a full body-length away, well outside Brannik’s reach as he studied him with those flat eyes.
“You know what I keep coming back to? All that fight in the warehouse. Three of mine on the floor, two of them not getting up right. And then nothing. Days of nothing. You sit there and growl and you don’t try the restraints once.
” A pause. “A dumb beast doesn’t stop trying.
A dumb beast rubs its own hands off fighting the metal.
” His gaze dropped deliberately to Brannik’s wrist and the folded strip of clean cloth knotted there.
He kept his breathing slow and his eyes half-lidded and empty. But behind the mask, everything in him went still and cold, because the fool had noticed the cloth and a fool who noticed things was a fool who might start noticing her, and that could not be allowed to happen.
“Doesn’t matter.” Vashen straightened, losing interest, the thought sliding off him the way most thoughts slid off males like him.
“Kitchen brat probably felt sorry for the animal. Point is—” he snapped his fingers at the runner, who came forward with the case, hands unsteady— “patron’s coming.
And you might not be as dumb as you’re pretending to be. ”
He didn’t move. He didn’t so much as twitch a finger.
He’d seen this moment coming since he’d heard the talk in the corridor.
The patron’s arrival was changing the rules, and Krebb’s people were getting nervous.
They wanted to know what they had in the basement before they put it on display.
They wanted to make sure it wouldn’t surprise them.
And they were too stupid to realize that asking questions of a thing you thought was an idiot was the surest way to get an answer you weren’t prepared for.
The needle came out, but he remained still.
He let the runner’s shaking hands find the big vein in the side of his throat, and he let the runner inject him, knowing immediately that it wasn’t as strong as the dose that had felled him.
But he let the false slackness come over him, and behind it his mind stayed as sharp as a filleting knife.
“There.” Vashen watched the drug take. “Now. Let’s talk about your eyes.”
There it is.
“Tuori don’t have eyes like that.” Vashen crouched again, closer now that the drug was in, peering at him with the confidence of a male looking at something safely leashed.
“You know who has eyes like that? I didn’t.
I had to ask around. Aurelian is what I heard.
” His scarred mouth twisted. “They’re supposed to be extinct.
But the patron pays a fortune for rumors about old blood.
Strange abilities. Species that shouldn’t exist anymore.
And your eyes are a lot more than a rumor. ”