Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
The growling reached Amy before she reached the cell door.
She stopped in the corridor with the covered bowl balanced on her palm and listened to the low, rolling, unbroken snarl that came up through the floor and into the soles of her feet.
She’d heard him growl before—short bursts, warnings, and the odd dry rumble that she’d learned to read as something close to a laugh.
This wasn’t any of those. This didn’t stop.
It went on and on, a great furious engine of a sound, and under it she could hear the clank of metal dragging against its anchors.
“Wouldn’t go in there today,” the guard by the intersection said. He was one of the younger ones, picking at something under a claw with a blade. “They had another go at it this morning. It’s not happy.”
“It never eats when it’s not fed,” she said, which wasn’t an answer, and kept walking before he could turn it into a conversation.
She’d gotten good at that over the last four years.
Say something that sounds like agreement, keep her voice flat and bored and boyish, and move on before anyone looks at her long enough to wonder.
The trick was to never let them see her decide anything.
Deciding was something that belonged to people who mattered, and her survival was built on not mattering.
But her feet slowed anyway as the growl got louder, and when she reached the cell door she came to a halt.
She hadn’t meant to. Her body did it without asking her, some animal instinct flatly refusing to walk into a room with that sound in it.
She could see him through the open door, and he was worse than she’d ever seen him.
New marks covered every exposed part of his body.
There was a gash high on one cheekbone, still wet.
His whole enormous frame had pulled taut against the restraints, his shoulders bunched into a wall of muscle, and his hair covered his face so all she could see beneath it was the flash of fangs as he snarled.
He looked like every warning she’d ever been given about this place made flesh.
He looked exactly like what they had called him. A beast.
For one heartbeat the fear she’d spent days quietly disarming came back all at once, and she couldn’t make herself take the step. But then his silver eyes found her frozen in the doorway, the bowl clutched to her chest and one foot already half-turned to leave. And the growl died.
Not faded or trailed off. It stopped completely, as though he’d reached inside his own chest and closed a hand around the sound.
In the sudden ringing quiet she heard her own pulse and the drip of water and nothing else at all.
Then he moved, slowly and deliberately folding those massive shoulders down and retreating back against the wall until the chains at his wrists and ankles pulled tight and stopped him.
As far from her as the metal would let him go.
He pressed his spine to the cold wall and made himself as small as a male of his size could make himself.
Then he dropped his gaze to the floor, and went utterly, deliberately still.
Oh, she thought.
The fear left her the way water drained out of a cracked cup, in a sudden rush, and something painfully tender took its place.
He’d seen her hesitate. He’d seen her afraid of him.
And his answer had been to get as far away from her as his chains allowed and make himself quiet for her.
A minute ago he’d been furious enough to bend the wall bolts, and the second she flinched he’d made himself into the safest shape he could manage so that she wouldn’t be frightened.
You great idiot, she thought, and the thought was warm and fond and she was through the door before she’d finished thinking it.
“You can stop that.” Her voice sounded strange to her, too soft, not the flat bored register she used everywhere in this compound. She cleared her throat and tried again. “The tragic hostage act. I’ve seen you glare at a bread round like it owed you money. I’m not scared of you.”
He looked at her from under his hair and there was something in his eyes that made her chest ache. Then she got close enough to see how they’d chained him, and the last of her softness curdled into anger.
They’d shortened everything. Both wrist restraints had been drawn up and locked off against the wall anchors, high and tight, so that his arms were pinned back and up at an angle no body was meant to hold.
The ankle chains too. He couldn’t have reached his own knees, let alone the floor.
There was an untouched dish in front of him, a full body-length beyond anything he could reach.
They’d fed him this morning by putting food where he could see it and know that he couldn’t have it. They’d hurt him. And then they’d left.
“Right,” she said, low and vicious, to the whole rotten place. “Right.”
She set her own dish down and looked at the tangle of chains, understanding immediately that she couldn’t fix them.
They were locked, and she had no key, and even if she had, she wasn’t fool enough to unlock the biggest prisoner in Port Rusk with a guard forty feet up the corridor.
Which meant she couldn’t put the food down anywhere he could eat it.
She sighed and uncovered the dish. She’d made it specifically for him, the way she’d been quietly doing for days now.
Instead of cheap protein bricks, she’d cooked stewed roots and added river-fish she’d flaked apart with her fingers, along with the grain-heavy bread he liked.
She scooped up some of the fish with a piece of the bread, and shuffled forward on her knees until she was close to him.
She was closer than she’d been since the day she’d cleaned his wrist, close enough to feel the heat coming off that vast body like an open oven, and then she lifted the food to his mouth.
He froze, staring at her.
“It’s this or you starve.” Her hand was shaking, and she hated that, and she held it up anyway. “And I didn’t flake a whole fish apart with my thumbs to watch you starve on principle. Open.”
For a long moment he only looked at her. Those unreadable silver eyes held hers with the intensity that had frightened her the very first day and now did something else to her entirely. Then his lips parted, and he leaned forward the inch the chains allowed and he took the food from her fingers.
His mouth closed over her fingers. She felt the warmth of it, the faint graze of a fang held carefully away from her skin, and then the pull as he took the bite and drew back.
He never once looked away from her. He chewed and swallowed and watched her the whole time.
There was nothing dumb in that gaze, nothing beast in it, nothing but a fierce banked attention fixed on her like she was the only real thing in the room.
She fed him another bite. A soft bit of root this time, and his mouth closed over her fingertips a fraction of a second longer. She felt the heat of his breath, and something low in her belly pulled tight in a way she had no business allowing.
“You’d think,” she heard herself say unsteadily, filling the terrible intimate silence the only way she knew, “a warrior who put three males on the floor could manage to feed himself. But no. He has to be waited on hand and foot. Like a—” her breath caught as his lips grazed her fingers again— “like a prince.”
Something moved in his eyes. Amusement. That dry silver spark she’d learned to find, warm and aimed at her, and it undid her more than the growling ever could have.
Bite by bite she fed him. She lost track of how long it took.
It felt outside of time, the two of them in a small circle of quiet, the compound and the guards and the whole grinding machinery of Port Rusk gone soft and far away.
There was only the weight of his gaze and the warmth of his mouth and the deliberate care he took, every single time, to keep those fangs from ever coming near her skin.
He could have taken her whole hand off. She knew that.
He knew she knew it. And he took each piece of food as gently as if her fingers were something he’d break by breathing wrong.
When the dish was nearly empty she noticed a fleck of the root stew caught in the hard line of his lips. Without thinking, she reached up and brushed it away with her thumb.
He didn’t move. Neither did she.
Her thumb rested at the corner of that surprisingly soft mouth, and his lips brushed it with the faintest pressure, no more than a breath, but unmistakably deliberate, and everything in the whole rotten galaxy stopped.
His eyes had gone dark, the silver swallowed down to a thin bright ring, and they were fixed on hers, and she couldn’t look away, and she didn’t want to.
She could feel his breath against her wrist. She could feel her own heart slamming so hard against her ribs that she was sure he could hear it and know exactly what was happening to her.
Neither of them breathed. Neither of them moved.
His mouth against her thumb, her eyes locked on his, and the air between them so thick and close it felt like a storm about to break—
“Oi.” Boots in the corridor as the young guard approached, closer than he had any right to be. “You still in there, kitchen help? It doesn’t need a bedtime story.”
She snatched her hand back as the world rushed in.
The smell of blood and metal and danger surrounded her as the guard’s shape darkened the doorway.
She was on her feet with the empty bowl gathered against her chest and her face schooled back into flat boyish nothing before the guard had finished the sentence.
“Just clearing the bowls,” she said, and her voice came out steady, thank every god she didn’t believe in, flat and bored and utterly unremarkable.
“It’s fine. Barely moves.” She stacked the morning’s untouched dish under the empty one and ducked her chin and made herself small and forgettable and walked towards the door.
She didn’t look back at him. She didn’t dare. But she felt his eyes on her the whole length of the cell, and she felt them still after the door had ground shut behind her and she was walking too fast up the corridor with her pulse thundering in her ears.
That night she couldn’t sleep. Her little room over the restaurant had never felt so small. She lay on the narrow cot with the quilt kicked down around her ankles and stared at the water-stained ceiling and listened to Pelloq’s floorboards settling, and she could not make her body be quiet.
Instead her body hummed. That was the only word she had for it.
Some low restless current ran beneath her skin and would not switch off.
Something gathered hot and insistent low in her belly, an ache she hadn’t let herself feel in four careful, invisible years.
She’d unwound the binding from her chest hours ago and now even the drag of the blanket against her bare skin felt like too much and not enough at once.
She pressed her thumb against her mouth in the dark, where his lips had brushed it, and something clenched sweet and low and hopeless inside her.
I’ve lost my mind, she told the ceiling. He’s a prisoner. He’s a Tuori warrior twice my size. He’s chained to a wall in a slaver’s compound and I’m lying here—she couldn’t even finish the thought.
She turned onto her side and curled up small, the way she slept, the way she did everything.
And in the darkness behind her eyes she relived every moment.
The way he’d stopped growling the instant she flinched.
The way he’d pressed himself to the wall to make her less afraid.
The way he’d taken each bite so carefully from her hands and never once looked away, like she was someone worth seeing. Like she was the whole world.
Nobody had looked at her like that in four years. Nobody had looked at her like that in her whole life.
She pressed her face into the flat pillow and let out a trembling breath, and lay awake, restless and aching and thinking about her warrior, long after the compound and the port and the indifferent night had gone quiet around her.