Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
The word came out of Brannik before he’d decided to let it, and she nearly tripped over the bowl of food.
It rocked on the floor, stew sloshing up the side, and she steadied it without ever taking her eyes off him.
Those hazel eyes had gone huge in the gloom, brown and green and wide as a child’s, and he felt the mistake settle into his gut like a swallowed stone.
He’d spent what felt like endless days in this cold cell being exactly what they thought he was—a beast, a broken thing, a specimen too stupid or too mad to be worth guarding closely.
He’d swallowed his own voice because silence was the one weapon no one had ever been able to take from him.
He’d meant to stay silent until he had a plan that got them both out of this place alive.
But she’d walked in with the answers he’d been bleeding for.
Keys. Bloodlines that wake the machines.
A priest of the Grorn. Answers he’d chased across multiple systems and multiple ports, and she’d carried them to him with a bowl of food because a distracted cook had sent her down the wrong corridor.
She had stumbled into the center of something that had killed males far more careful than she, and then she had knelt in front of him with her fingers on his wrist and offered to go deeper.
That was what pulled the word out of him.
Not want, but fear. A cold, unfamiliar fear that had nothing to do with his own skin.
Because he’d seen what happened to people who went looking.
And the thought of her small, stubborn, quick-eyed self walking into that type of danger unlocked something in him he’d kept bolted shut for twenty-five years.
She was still staring at him.
“You can talk?”
He looked at her. He did not answer. It was, he judged, an extraordinarily obvious question. He had already demonstrated the answer in a single syllable, and repeating himself was a waste of the voice he’d only just decided to use. He held her eyes and let the silence do the confirming.
He watched her process it. He watched the shock crack and the color come up her throat and saw the exact moment the fear turned into something else. Something hotter and angrier. Her jaw set. Her fingers, still on his wrist, curled into a small fist against his skin.
“You can talk,” she said again, and this time it wasn’t a question. It was an accusation. “You’ve been able to talk this whole time.”
He said nothing.
“I’ve been kneeling in this—this hole—every single day, talking at you like a fool.
Telling you about Resh, and the awful customer with the tail, and—” Her voice climbed and she caught it, dragging it back down to a furious whisper, and the effort of that restraint made it shake.
“I told you things. I sat here and rattled on like an idiot because I thought you couldn’t answer, and you were just sitting there. Letting me.”
Her fury delighted him. There was no other word honest enough for it.
She’d come to him frightened for so long, small and careful, tucked down into the shape of a boy who was nobody.
Now she was blazing at him, her chin up and her eyes flashing, close enough that he could feel the heat of her outrage on his face, and she’d forgotten entirely to be afraid.
She’d forgotten to make herself small. She was, for the first time since he’d met her, taking up exactly as much space as she was owed, and it was the most beautiful thing he had seen in longer than he could measure.
The corner of his mouth lifted.
“You’re laughing,” she hissed. “You... You absolute—”
“Quiet.” He said it softly, but she stopped, because there was weight to the word, and her eyes narrowed at him instead.
He needed her afraid of the right thing. Not of him.
He slowly turned his wrist under her hand so his palm was beneath her fingers, and he gently closed his hand around hers, because touching her seemed to be the only language that reached past her temper.
“Listen to me,” he said. His voice came rough, cracked with disuse, each word dragged up from a deep, rusted place in his chest. “What you heard today. Keys. Bloodlines. The priest.” He held her eyes.
“You forget it. All of it. You don’t ask.
You don’t listen at doors. You don’t go back down that passage. ”
“But—”
“The males in this place kill for less than what you heard in that corridor.” Each word cost him and he deliberately said them anyway, letting her see that he meant every one. “Curious people die. I have watched it. If you want to help me, then stay invisible. That’s the help I need.”
She was quiet for a moment, reading him. She was good at that, better than she knew.
“That’s why you’re still here,” she said slowly. “Isn’t it? I’m sure you could get out. I know you’re not what they think you are. But you’re staying. You’re waiting for this priest.” Her fingers tightened in his. “You want something from him.”
He said nothing, and her lips thinned. “You won’t tell me.”
“No.”
“Because you don’t trust me.”
He felt that in a way he wasn’t prepared for. He looked at the hurt she tried to bury under anger, and recognized the braced hurt of someone who’d learned to expect being shut out. He suddenly understood that she thought this was about her. She thought his silence was a verdict on her worth.
“No,” he said again, and this time he made it soft and certain. “Not you.”
She frowned at him, and he tipped his head towards the door.
Towards the compound and the guards and the priest and the whole rotten network of corruption.
“I don’t trust them. If I tell you what I know, and they see one wrong expression on your face or realize you know something you shouldn’t, they will use you to break me open.
” He tightened his hand carefully around hers, careful of his strength the way he was always careful.
“I will not give them that. I’d rather you knew nothing and lived than knew everything and—” He stopped. He didn’t finish it. He didn’t need to.
Something eased in her face. The hurt went out of it. She let out a long breath, and her shoulders came down, and she looked at their joined hands—her small one nearly lost in his—and then back up at him.
“Fine,” she said quietly. “Fine. I’ll leave it.”
He didn’t believe her entirely, but he let it stand.
She said nothing for a moment. Then, of all the things he thought she might ask—what’s a Key, who’s coming, how do I get you out, what happens to you—she asked none of them.
“What’s your name?” she asked instead.
“Brannik,” he said. Just that. He had no house he’d claim, no clan he’d name for her, and no father to call himself the son of. Only the name his mother had given him before she vanished, the one thing that was entirely his.
“Brannik,” she repeated softly, like she was tasting it, and he should have felt the danger of that. Instead a warmth spread through his chest that he had no business feeling, chained in a cell with a priest of the Grorn on his way to open his veins. Then she smiled at him.
“Hello, Brannik. I’m Amy.”
And that was the end of his restraint. He caught the back of her neck in one hand and drew her in and kissed her.
She made a small startled sound against his mouth and then she wasn’t startled at all.
She leaned into him and kissed him back.
His voice had returned to him and his hunger had come with it, and he took her mouth like a male who’d been dying of thirst and had found her at the bottom of the well.
She tasted like the bread she carried in her pocket, with something sweeter beneath it.
She was warm, and alive, and his, and the growl that rolled up out of him was nothing like a warning.
He kept the hand at her nape gentle. Every other part of him wanted to drag her across his lap and into the shelter of his body and never let the world reach her again.
He held it all in check, the strength and the starvation, and only let himself have this one kiss.
He let himself have her mouth and the small helpless sounds she made when he tilted her head and went deeper because he could give her this without breaking her, and by every star he had ever steered by, he wanted to give her everything.
She broke away first, gasping, her forehead dropping to his, her fingers still clutching his shoulders.
“Brannik,” she breathed a third time, soft and unsteady against his lips.
He’d spent twenty-five years believing there was nothing worth breaking his silence for. Apparently he’d been wrong.