Chapter 6 #2
He held his slack, drugged silence, and thought about his mother’s eyes, the one gift she’d left him.
Those eyes had caught the light in that warehouse and that’s why he was still in this cell.
It would have been almost funny if it weren’t so bleakly stupid, because they had it wrong.
Whatever the Aurelians were rumored to do, he’d never done it.
He’d never felt a glimmer of whatever impossible thing his mother’s people were supposed to carry in their blood.
He was half Tuori, and the Tuori half was the big, brutal, obvious one.
The silver in his eyes was a freakish inheritance and nothing more.
His captors were holding a prize that didn’t exist. Their patron was going to arrive expecting something special and find a scarred cargo hand with a dead female’s eyes.
He should have felt relief. He didn’t. Because he’d found a hint of the answer he’d been chasing for years, and it turned his stomach cold.
The patron collects Aurelian blood. His mother had been a full Aurelian.
His mother had vanished out of a life she’d loved, away from a mate she’d been besotted with and a son she’d touched with gentle hands, and she’d never returned.
He’d spent his adult life following the rumor of Aurelians from port to port, and the rumor had led him here, to a network that hunted people like his mother and sold them to a buyer who wanted what was in their blood.
He’d walked into this warehouse looking for records of Aurelians. He’d never let himself finish the sentence that came after. But it finished itself now, in the cold clear space the drug had made in his skull.
What if she didn’t come back because someone took her?
The thought threatened to knock him down with a force that had nothing to do with the paralytic.
For twenty-five years he’d carried the certainty that she’d walked away—that he hadn’t been enough to keep her, that his father hadn’t been enough, that they’d both been abandoned by a quiet silver-eyed female who’d wanted something else more than she wanted them.
He’d built himself around that certainty the way his father had built himself around her.
And now a scar-jawed thug crouched a body-length away, gloating about his patron’s collection, cracked the certainty straight down the middle.
Answers. The one thing he’d wanted for a quarter of a century. The patron who searched for Aurelians might know. He might know where they came from and where they went. He might know whether one particular silver-eyed female had ever passed through his hands, and if so, whether she’d been dragged.
He had to meet this patron. He’d been willing to sit chained in this cell for days precisely so he could meet this patron, and now he wanted it more than he wanted the air the drug was slowing in his chest.
But something had changed since he’d made that plan.
Someone had knelt down and tended his wounds with her small bare hands and rewritten the whole calculation without knowing she’d done it.
Because the plan had always ended the same way.
He’d get the patron in reach and break the restraints they were so proud of.
He’d get the answers he wanted and turn the room into wreckage and leave over the bodies.
Simple. Clean. He’d done versions of it before. A male alone could always get out.
But he wasn’t leaving alone anymore. He couldn’t.
The old instinct had its teeth in him now and it would not let him walk out of this compound and off this world and leave the small brown-haired female behind in a place that fed prisoners to collectors and let its guards look at kitchen workers the way these ones did.
The thought of the door closing on her and Vashen’s flat eyes turning her way once Brannik was gone and there was no chained animal left to feed was not a thought he could allow.
The thought slid off him the way ideas slid off Vashen, and it left a track of something hot and dangerous behind.
She goes when I go. Whatever it costs. She goes.
Which meant he couldn’t simply wait for his moment and take it.
He had to make a moment big enough to carry both of them out of it.
And he had to do it without her ever guessing what he was about to do because if she knew what he was planning, she’d argue.
He was beginning to know her well enough to be certain of that.
“Nothing to say, huh.” Vashen sighed, his little interrogation apparently done.
He hadn’t gotten anything out of Brannik—he never did—and Brannik suspected that simple fact had convinced them more thoroughly than any story could that they’d caught something rare and half-feral and worth every credit.
“Suit yourself. Won’t matter soon. Patron’ll open you up and read whatever’s in there whether you talk or not. ”
Vashen gestured at the runner, who was already backing towards the door, still watching Brannik like the drug might wear off between one heartbeat and the next. “Keep it fed. Keep it breathing. And take that rag off its wrist—I don’t like it. Looks like somebody’s tending it.”
No.
The word went through him with more violence than anything else in the last hour.
Not the interrogation, not the possibility of answers, but the casual order to strip the cloth from his wrist. To take away the reminder of the only gentle hands that had touched him in longer than he could stand to count.
He let none of it reach his face. His face stayed slack and empty and drugged.
The runner edged towards him, reaching for his wrist. He let the male get close—let him get his twitchy fingers right up to the knot in the cloth—and then, in the half-second before those fingers closed, he moved his hand.
Just barely. A slow drugged twitch, exactly what the paralytic should allow, a mindless animal flinch away from an unwelcome touch.
The runner jerked back with a curse as Brannik let his hand fall again, limp and useless-looking.
But his hand had turned as it fell so that the wrist with the cloth on it was tucked against his side, half-hidden under the bulk of his forearm.
A beast curling protectively around a sore spot.
“Leave it,” Vashen said, already bored, already turning for the door. “It’ll chew your hand off, and you’re no use to me minus a hand. Rag doesn’t matter. Come on.”
The runner went gladly. Vashen followed, and the door groaned shut. The boots receded up the corridor, two males who had no idea they were walking out of a room with a countdown in it.
He sat in the returning quiet, the drug thick and false in his veins, his eyes half-lidded and empty for no audience at all, and let the mask drop by degrees.
Against his side, hidden and safe, the folded strip of her shirt lay knotted against his skin.
He turned the wrist until he could see the small scrap of grey cloth, the only thing in this whole rotting place that had come to him from a pair of hands that meant him no harm.
He’d been telling himself since he arrived that he was waiting for the patron.
That he was waiting for answers to his mother’s disappearance to resolve out of the darkness.
All of that was still true. He would have this patron in reach.
He would have his answers if he had to take them out of the male one syllable at a time.
But somewhere in the last handful of days, without his permission, something else had climbed above those answers.
It was not something he’d chosen and it was not something he could reason his way out of and it was, he was fairly sure, the exact thing he’d spent twenty-five years swearing would never get its teeth into him.
A small female with hazel eyes and a torn shirt was going to walk into this cell tomorrow with food she’d smuggled past the guards.
And he was going to have to start working out how to get her out of Port Rusk before a collector of impossible people arrived and started wondering who’d been so tender with the wrist of a chained beast.