Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The panel above the galley bench had been rattling for two days, and on the third morning Amy came in to find Brannik half inside it.
He’d wedged his enormous shoulders into a space clearly built for a much smaller crew member, and one arm was buried to the elbow in a nest of wiring while the rest of him was folded into a painful-looking crouch.
His horns scraped the underside of the shelf. He didn’t so much as grunt.
“You’re going to break the ship taking it apart,” she said.
“It was already broken.”
“Was it?”
“The coolant line was chafing.” A soft click from somewhere inside the wall. The rattle that had haunted her sleep for two nights stopped. He withdrew his arm, uncurled to his full appalling height, and set the panel back into place with two fingers as though closing a book. “Now it isn’t.”
She watched him wipe grease off his claws with the same rag she’d used on his wounds, and she thought—not for the first time in the past two days—that she had no idea who this male actually was.
She’d known the prisoner. She’d known the silver eyes watching from under matted hair, the still presence of him against a wall, and the terrible controlled violence she’d glimpsed once and hoped never to see again.
But this male wandered the corridors of a stolen cargo ship at odd hours fixing things nobody had asked him to fix.
He’d rewired a flickering light in the sleeping berth.
He’d rerouted the water so it ran hot enough to actually wash in.
He’d found a jammed cargo hatch on the second day and stood staring at it as if it were a personal offense until he’d pried it open, and then he’d looked almost content.
She’d never in her life met a creature so large who so plainly needed to be useful.
“Sit,” he said. “You should eat.”
“You cooked?”
“I made food.” A distinction, she’d learned, that mattered.
He set a bowl in front of her, and she looked down at it, and her heart sank the same way it had for the past two days.
He’d found the ship’s ration stores—dried protein, packet grains, and other things meant to be boiled into something edible.
He had, technically, done that. But what sat steaming in the bowl was grey and glutinous and smelled faintly scorched, and there were hard bits in it that had not been hard when they went in, and soft bits that should not have been soft.
“You burned it,” she said. “And also somehow didn’t cook it.”
“Both are possible.”
“Not on purpose.” She picked up the spoon, poked at a lump, and looked up to find him watching her with the flat expression of a male awaiting a verdict he already knew. “Brannik. How did you survive twenty years on cargo ships eating like this?”
“Ships had cooks. Or I bought food in port.” He paused. “Or I didn’t taste it.”
“You didn’t taste it.” She set the spoon down. “You know what, I believe that completely, because no one who tasted this would ever make it twice.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth, the small quirk that meant he was amused and pretending not to be. He was getting easier to read, or she was getting better at reading him, which amounted to the same thing.
“You cook,” he said.
“I do, and I’m good at it. It’s the one thing about this whole nightmare life that ever actually belonged to me.
” She pushed the bowl an inch towards him.
“And starting tomorrow, I’m doing this, because I refuse to die in space of the worst meal ever assembled by a sentient being.
You’ve done enough. Show me how to use these machines, then fix things and leave the food to me. ”
He looked at the bowl. He looked at her. And then he pulled the bowl back to his side, picked up the spoon in one absurdly large hand, and ate it. All of it. Without expression. Because he’d made it and she wasn’t going to, and it would be wasted otherwise.
She put her face in her hands and laughed until her ribs hurt.
“You should start now,” he added when she’d finally stopped laughing. “I don’t want you to go hungry.”
And her laughter was replaced by a tenderness that made her chest ache as much as her ribs.
She learned other things about him in the slow days of the journey, the way you learned things about a person when there was nowhere to go and nothing to do but exist in the same small space.
He slept lightly. She’d wake in the dark of the sleeping berth and find him on the floor in front of the door, barely covered by a blanket, his eyes already open, silver catching the low light, watching the door. Always positioned between her and whatever might come through it.
He did it without thinking. That was the part that got under her skin.
When they moved through the ship together he drifted to her left, towards the corridor, towards the open side.
When they reached a hatch he went through first. When something clanged deep in the ship’s belly, he was in front of her, his arm flung across the passage like a bar, before she’d even registered the sound.
He hadn’t decided to do it. His body had automatically put itself between her and a possible danger.
No one had ever stood between her and anything before. For four years she’d been the one that got shoved aside, sold off, and walked past. To be automatically, unconsciously guarded by someone who could tear a door off its hinges did strange things to her chest that she didn’t examine too closely.
She noticed a lot of things about him that she probably shouldn’t have.
The way he filled a doorway. The way his hair fell across his hard face and he’d push it back with the heel of his hand, and she’d catch a full look at the line of his jaw and have to find somewhere else to put her eyes.
The way he moved—too quietly, too smoothly, for someone that size.
It felt as if the whole ship should groan beneath his weight and instead he moved across it as easily and silently as water flowed.
The faint metal sheen on the dark bronze of his skin caught the light, and she kept finding reasons to be near it.
It had been building since the cell. She could admit that, alone in the dark with her hand pressed against her chest. It had been building since the first time her fingers brushed his skin and her stomach fluttered.
It had built through every stolen moment, every kiss, every touch.
Now there were no chains between them and no guards and nowhere to flee to, and it had nowhere to go but up.
She told herself it was proximity. Fear did strange things. Gratitude did stranger ones. She’d been so long without touch, without anyone looking at her and seeing a woman, that of course the first male who actually saw her would light her up like a struck match.
She almost believed it.
His wounds needed tending again on the fourth day.
The deep cut at his temple had scabbed clean, but the raw rings around his wrists kept splitting when he worked.
The worst of the bruising along his ribs had bloomed into ugly greens and yellows that told her something underneath had cracked.
She’d made him sit on the edge of the bunk while she knelt on it beside him, the ship’s little medical kit open on the blanket.
She started at his wrists the way she had in the cell, cleaning them and wrapping them in fresh bandages.
It was different now. In the cell he’d held as still as stone, forbidden by circumstance from moving, chained and watched by guards. Now he was free. And now that he was free, he touched her.
He’d started small. His right hand had come up while she worked on his left wrist and rested lightly against her hip, giving her all the room in the world to pull away.
She hadn’t. So it had stayed. And when she’d moved to his ribs, leaning across him to reach the bruising on the far side, his other hand had settled at the small of her back, warm and enormous and steadying.
She’d frozen with her fingertips resting against his skin.
“This is going to hurt,” she said, her voice low and breathless.
“You keep saying that.”
“You keep bleeding.”
She pressed the cloth to the split under the restraint mark, and he didn’t so much as tense, but his hand flexed against her back, drawing her a fraction closer, and the heat of his body ran all down her front where she leaned into him. She stopped pretending she was thinking about medicine.
She looked up, and he was already looking at her.
Of course he was. Those silver eyes, no longer half-hidden behind his hair, were fixed on her with the intensity that had frightened her the very first day and didn’t frighten her at all now.
His gaze dropped to her mouth, and came back up.
It was a question, as clear as anything he’d ever said aloud.
She kissed him.
She was tired of running from it. She leaned across the last inch of space between them and pressed her mouth to his. This time there was no guard to break the kiss, no chain to remind them, and nowhere she had to hurry off to afterwards. This time it could just happen.
He made a sound low in his chest, a rumble she felt more than heard, and his hand slid down her spine and pulled her against him.
His other hand left her hip and came up to cradle the back of her head, his claws carefully retracted as he tilted her head exactly the way he wanted her.
The kiss stopped being tentative and started being something else entirely.
He kissed like he did everything—slowly and deliberately and so thoroughly that she forgot every lie she’d been telling herself for the past four days.
The medical kit slid off the bunk. Neither of them cared.