Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Pell had his back to Amy, shouting at the delivery boy about a crate of soft callafruit, and she took the food cart from its place at the end of the counter and slipped out the back door while he was still yelling.
She knew what he’d say. He’d already said it, three times, in the low hard voice he only used when he was truly afraid.
You do not go back there. Not today. Not tomorrow.
Let someone else carry the pots. He’d gripped her shoulder with all four fingers and looked at her the way a male looks at something he already suspects he’s going to lose.
She was going back anyway. She told herself it was because of the deliveries, because missing a day would draw Krebb’s wrath, that Brannik had barely eaten yesterday and no one else would bother to bring him food he could actually eat.
All of it was true, but none of it was why.
The why sat behind her ribs, low and certain and stupid, and it carried her up the familiar alleys towards Krebb’s compound with the handcart in front of her.
The wrongness hit her at the gate. The guard there was one who’d waved her through a hundred times without lifting his eyes off his own boots.
Today his eyes came up. They came up and they stayed, sliding down the loose fall of her tunic, and something moved behind them that had never been there before.
It wasn’t lust, not exactly, but the slow arithmetic of a male pricing something he’d walked past every day without knowing what it was worth.
They know.
Her stomach dropped like a stone down a well.
She kept her steps even. She kept her chin tucked and her shoulders hunched forward in the small shape she’d worn so long it fit her better than her own skin.
She made herself keep walking because stopping would confirm his suspicions, and running would be worse.
He let her through the gate. That was almost the worst part. He let her through, and turned his head to watch her go.
Inside, it was everywhere. The two males lounging by the storeroom stopped their talk as she passed and didn’t start again until she’d turned the corner.
A third, crossing the yard, actually paused mid-stride.
Yesterday she had been furniture. Invisible.
The kitchen boy nobody noticed. Today she felt every gaze land on her and cling like a burr, and each one told her the same thing, over and over, a bell she couldn’t stop ringing.
They know what you are.
She unloaded the cart in a kitchen that went silent when she appeared, then headed for the familiar corridor outside the cells.
Her hands were steady on the bowl because she’d learned long ago how to keep her hands steady while the rest of her came apart.
The guard outside the cells seemed to be one of the few who didn’t know, waving her through with his usual lack of interest. Breathing a silent prayer of relief, she ducked through the door into the dim cell.
Brannik was crouching against the far wall, huge and silent, silver eyes already lifted to the door as if he’d been listening for her feet all along.
He looked at her, and his expression confirmed what the guards’ faces had already told her.
“They know,” she whispered.
“They know. The priest told them.” His voice was low, still rough from disuse, and even now the sound of it did something to her she couldn’t afford. “You have to leave, Amy. Not just the compound. The port. Today.”
She set the bowl down harder than she meant to. “And go where?”
“Anywhere they aren’t.”
“That’s not a place.” She crouched in front of him, keeping her back to the corridor and her voice equally low.
“You think I have somewhere to go? I have a room over a kitchen and no papers and no credits and a face that would get me sold the moment anyone looks twice. Which they are now doing. Thanks to that priest.” Her voice was shaking, and she hated it.
“Pell won’t give me up easily. I’d bet my life on that.
But he’s only one male and he doesn’t have the power to stop them.
But a runaway with no owner is fair game to anyone who wants to drag me back for the bounty.
Do you understand? There is no anywhere they aren’t.
I’ve been hiding from people like them for four years and the galaxy is full of them. ”
The chains creaked as he shifted, straining towards her the small distance they allowed. “I’ll come and find you.”
“You’ll—” She almost laughed, and it came out cracked. “How?”
“I’ll find you.”
“That’s not an answer, that’s the same words in a lower voice.
” She leaned in. “How, Brannik? Where do I go so that you can find me? Where do I go that’s safe?
What’s the plan? Because I can’t spend the rest of my life sitting in some hole hoping a male who’s currently chained to a wall keeps a promise he can’t explain. ”
His jaw set. His eyes went flat and stubborn, and he said nothing at all, and she recognized that silence.
It wasn’t the can’t-speak silence he’d worn for weeks, it was the won’t-tell silence, the one that meant he’d already decided something and he had no intention of letting her weigh in on her own life.
And that was what made her lose it.
“No.” The word came out too loud and she pulled it back to a hiss, but the fury under it didn’t shrink at all.
“No. You don’t get to do that. Everyone does that.
The males who took me did that. They decided where I’d be and what I’d do and whether I lived.
Krebb decided. That damn priest is deciding what I’m worth, like I’m a crate of callafruit.
And now you—” She had to stop and breathe.
“I trust you. God help me, I don’t know why, but I do, and that is exactly why I will not sit here and be told go, run, I’ll handle it, by another male who won’t tell me the plan.
I’d rather be afraid and know than be safe and blind.
If I’m going to jump, I decide when. Me. Not you.”
She braced herself for his anger. She’d seen his temper, and heard the growls that rattled the stone, and felt the way the whole cell seemed smaller when the beast came up in him. But it didn’t come.
Instead something crossed his hard face that she had no defense for at all. The stubbornness went out of it. What was left underneath was so raw and so quiet that she forgot, for a second, to be angry.
“Come here,” he said.
She should have said no. She was in the middle of a very good argument about not doing what he told her. But she was already leaning in, because her body had stopped waiting for her permission a long time ago where he was concerned.
He kissed her.
Not like the last time, the bruising crash of his mouth against hers where his restraint had nearly snapped and hers with it.
This was slow. He kissed her like he had all the time in the world and no chains, as if the wall he was bolted to had simply ceased to exist. One enormous hand came up as far as the irons let it and his knuckles grazed the line of her jaw with a gentleness that had no business existing in a body that size.
The gentleness destroyed her more thoroughly than the fierce kiss ever had. Her eyes stung and she leaned into him, breathing him in, and for one suspended moment there was no priest and no port and no price on her head, there was only the warm impossible fact of being held.
He pulled back just far enough to speak against her mouth.
“I don’t have a plan,” he admitted quietly. “I just know that if you stay, they will take you. You have to leave before they do.” His thumb feathered across her jaw again. “But I will find you. And when I do, no one touches you again. Not the priest. Not Krebb. Not anyone. I promise you that.”
She let out a breath that was half a laugh and half something wetter. She looked at the heavy irons on his wrists, the padding she’d tied there herself around one of them, and the raw skin above it. She looked at the chain running to the ring in the wall, as thick as her arm.
“You’re chained to a wall,” she whispered.
He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He just looked at her with that steady silver look, as patient as the stone surrounding them, certain of something he had no possible right to be certain of.
He held her gaze and did not blink. And the terrible thing, the thing that made her chest ache, was that she almost believed him.
She sat back on her heels. Her heart was still slamming and her mind was still screaming that running meant open ground and no walls. It meant every stranger’s eye looking for her and no locked door at the end of the day. Four years of surviving by staying still, and now he was telling her to move.
“I hate this,” she said quietly. “I want you to know that. I hate running. Staying invisible is the only thing that’s kept me alive and you’re asking me to walk out into the open and be seen.”
“I know.”
“You’re probably right, though.” The words tasted like rust. She made herself say them anyway, because she’d meant what she’d said—she’d rather know than be blind, and knowing meant admitting something she didn’t want to admit.
“That priest wants to put a price on me. Krebb’s males are already looking at me like—” She swallowed it.
“Staying still isn’t going to work anymore.
Staying still is how I’m going to be found. I know it. I hate it, but I know it.”
Something eased in his shoulders. He’d been braced for her to refuse, to cling to the safety she’d built even after it had stopped being safe.
“Tonight,” he said. “After the port sleeps. Take nothing they’d notice missing.”
“I still don’t have anywhere—”
Boots sounded in the corridor, coming closer, the heavy uneven tread she knew far too well.
She grabbed the pot and dropped her head and shrank down over it as she headed for the door. She was still doing it, still trying to shrink herself into a kitchen boy who no longer existed, but she’d only taken a few steps down the corridor when Krebb’s shadow fell over her.
“There you are,” he said in a voice he’d never used with her, warm and pleased and terrible. “I’ve been looking for you.”