Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“There’s a room for you,” Serei said, walking towards them as though she hadn’t just watched her son kiss a human female half off the side of a mountain. “I thought you might want it now.”
Brannik set Amy back on her feet, but he didn’t let go of her hand. He was aware of the heat still in his face, of Amy pressed against his side and pretending very hard that she hadn’t been crying, and of his mother’s mild silver gaze taking in all of it and drawing every correct conclusion.
“Mother—”
“I’m not going to say anything.” She turned and began to walk. “I said everything I needed to say yesterday. Come. It’s this way.”
She led them through the enclave, and he followed with Amy’s hand in his and something strange happening in his chest, some warm ache he had no name for.
The Aurelian homes were carved from pale mountain stone, the doorways smooth and rounded.
The same warm light glowed from within that he remembered from a small stone lamp his mother had kept on Tuor.
He thought he’d remembered the lamp wrong for twenty-five years, and then he’d walked in here and seen a hundred of them.
A piece of his childhood, scattered through a settlement he’d never known existed.
They passed a communal hall where someone was cooking, and Amy’s head immediately turned towards it, cataloguing the scents. He filed that away. He’d promised her a kitchen. He intended to deliver it.
His mother stopped at a small building near the far edge, where the mountain opened out again and the valley showed through a wide unglazed window in the rock. The room beyond was small and warm with a bed built into an alcove, a low table, and one of the stone lamps glowing amber in the corner.
“It was going to be yours,” his mother said, without looking at either of them. “When we brought you here.” She touched the doorframe, a brief gesture, there and gone. “It should be lived in.”
He didn’t have words for that. He rarely had the words, but this was different—not the deliberate silence he’d worn like armor for a quarter of a century, but the ordinary failure of a male handed something too large to hold.
Then his mother looked up at him with the same knot of grief and joy tangled so tightly he couldn’t tell them apart.
She reached up and pressed her palm to his cheek one more time.
Then she gave him a dry, knowing, unmistakable look, one eyebrow lifting a fraction as her gaze flicked to Amy and back. For one absurd moment she looked like the mother who used to catch him sneaking sweetened bread and pretend she hadn’t.
“Goodnight, my son,” she said, and left.
The only light that remained was the amber lamp and the last of the dusk in the wide stone window. And it was just the two of them, and the small warm room, and the quiet.
Amy let out a breath. “Your mother,” she said, “is terrifying.”
“Yes.”
“In a good way.” She turned to him, and in the lamplight her hazel eyes were still faintly swollen, her hair loose around her face now that she never needed to hide it.
She looked up at him, all five feet, four inches of her, and the impossible tenderness rose up in him, the tenderness that had frightened him so badly in that cell, the tenderness he’d spent days trying not to feel because feeling it made him vulnerable and vulnerability got people killed.
He was done being frightened of it.
“Amy.” He said her name, and even that was hard, because saying anything at all had always been the same as handing someone a knife and showing them where to put it.
He made himself do it anyway. “I need to say something. And I’m—” His jaw worked.
“I’m not good at this. You know I’m not good at this. ”
“You don’t have to—”
“I do.” He caught both her hands and folded them inside one of his.
“You told me you spent four years wanting nothing so nobody could take it from you. I did the same thing with words.” His jaw tightened.
“I was eleven when my mother disappeared. Six months later my father left too. I learned that if you say what matters out loud, the universe hears you and takes it. So I stopped saying anything. Silence was the only place that felt safe.”
She went still, her hand flexing within his.
“Then you came into that cell and talked enough for both of us.”
A tiny smile touched her mouth.
“I fought wanting you. I fought speaking to you. I thought both things made you vulnerable.” He raised her hands to his chest and held them there, over the heavy, slow beat of his heart. “I was wrong.”
He held her gaze.
“I looked across a galaxy for a place to belong, and I found it in a cell with a terrified human female.” His throat threatened to close, but he pushed through it. She deserved the words, no matter how much they cost. “I love you, Amy.”
Her breath caught.
“I’ve barely said anything in twenty-five years, so believe me when I say this.” His hands tightened gently around hers. “I belong where you are.”
For a moment she didn’t move at all. Then she made a small broken sound and rose up on her toes, and he bent to meet her because this was how it worked between them, neither one having to reach the whole distance alone.
The kiss started soft. It didn’t stay there.
He felt the change in her the way he felt weather coming, her fingers uncurling against his chest and sliding up to the collar of his shirt and her body deliberately leaning into him.
He carefully picked her up, three hundred pounds of Tuori warrior lifting a female who came up to his sternum, and she made an impatient sound against his mouth, the same sound she’d made on the ship.
The sound that meant stop being so careful, I won’t break.
“The bed,” she said against his lips. “Take me to bed.”
He carried her to it. The alcove was Aurelian-sized, which was to say built for people the size of his mother, and he hit his shoulder on the low stone lintel.
She laughed breathlessly, her forehead dropping to his collarbone, and the laugh went through her whole body and into his.
He decided that he would happily brain himself on every doorway in the enclave if it kept her laughing like that.
“You’re too big for this room,” she said.
“I’ll build a bigger one.”
“You’d better.” She pulled him down.
He’d learned her by now. He knew that she liked his weight until she didn’t and he knew the difference between the tension of pleasure and the older tension of fear that sometimes surfaced.
He’d learned to read her the way he’d once read the moods of his captors, except that reading Amy was the only study he’d ever undertaken purely for the joy of getting it right.
He undressed her slowly in the amber light, and she let him, watching his face with those hazel eyes gone dark and soft.
There was no disguise hiding what she was. She was just Amy. Just his.
“You keep looking at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like you can’t believe I’m here.”
He pressed his mouth to the curve of her shoulder, to the soft place beneath her jaw, and the frantic pulse in her throat.
“I can’t,” he said against her skin, and felt her shiver.
Then he stopped talking, because he’d said everything that mattered now, and his hands could say the rest of it better.
She came apart under him with his name on her lips, and he held every ounce of his strength in check even as she urged him past it, even as she wrapped herself around him and told him she trusted him.
She urged him closer whenever instinct made him retreat, and he found the fine impossible balance he’d searched a whole life for without knowing it.
All that dangerous power was leashed and turned entirely to gentleness, all that violence he’d been feared for was turned into this instead, into the way she gasped and clutched at him and said his name like it was the only word she knew.
Afterwards he lay wrapped around her in the too-small bed, with his arm heavy across her stomach, her back against his chest, and her small warm body fitted into the curve of his enormous one like the other piece of him.
Her breathing slowed, and her hand found his where it rested over her heart and laced their fingers together.
“Say it again,” she murmured, half asleep.
He knew what she meant. Once it would have been impossible. Now it came as easily as breathing, all the fear burned away.
“I love you.”
He felt her smile in the shift of her cheek against his arm, and then she slept.
He didn’t. Not for a long while. He lay in the dark in his unused room, in a mountain full of his mother’s people, with his female asleep in his arms, and he waited for the old feeling to come, the hollow certainty that everyone he loved would eventually disappear, that safety was a lie, and that the only sane thing was to hold no one and speak to no one.
It didn’t come.
For the first time in twenty-five years, it simply wasn’t there.
His mother found them in the communal hall the next morning, where Amy had already inserted herself beside the enclave’s cook—a broad mixed-blood Aurelian named Tavek who’d started the meal scowling at the human female touching his pots and finished it laughing at something she’d said.
The two of them argued cheerfully about heat and timing over a pan of something that smelled better than anything he’d eaten in years.
His mother watched him watch Amy. She sat down across from him with her tea and said nothing for a while, in the comfortable way of a female who’d known him as a child.
“You look like your father this morning,” she said at last.
“How did he look?”
“Like a male who’d stopped running.” She wrapped her thin fingers around the cup.
“There’s a place for you here, Brannik. Both of you.
I’ve spoken to the others. You’re one of us—you activated the markers, you have the eyes, you have the blood.
You could stay. I have—” Her voice caught, just slightly, the sadness that lived under her surface breaking through for a moment.
“I have twenty-five years of you to make up for. I’d like to try. ”
He looked at his mother for a long moment.
Then he looked across the hall at Amy, at her loose hair and her flushed happy face and her hands moving with total confidence over another person’s stove.
He looked at the way Tavek had already started deferring to her without seeming to notice he was doing it.
He looked at a female who wanted a door she could open as herself, and a kitchen that was hers, and people who knew her name.
The enclave was safe. It was hidden. It was buried deep in a mountain behind wards only Aurelian blood could pass.
It was exactly the kind of place a male built for someone he was afraid of losing.
But his father had never done that. His father had given his mother choices, every time, even when every Tuori instinct in him screamed to lock her somewhere safe and stand guard at the door.
“No,” he said.
His mother’s face didn’t fall. It went still, with the same stillness he recognized in himself.
“There’s a settlement,” he said. “Two days out. An independent trade port, on the coast where the river meets the sea. I saw it on the approach and checked the records. It’s a free town where people come and go as they please.
” He turned his cup slowly in his huge hands.
“She wants her own kitchen, and people who know her name. She can’t have that buried in the mountains.
She spent four years hidden. I won’t hide her again, even to keep her safe. Especially to keep her safe.”
For a long moment his mother was quiet. Then she smiled slowly, the melancholy easing as something proud and aching replaced it.
“That’s exactly what he would have said,” she murmured.
“If she likes the settlement, we’ll stay.
But we’ll come back.” He glanced at Amy, and at Tavek laughing again.
“She’s already making friends. And if the Grorn ever come back or you ever need someone who can walk your wards and swing a blade, you send word and I’ll be here before you finish sending it.
” He set the cup down. “But we’ll build our own place in the light, where people can see her and know her and be glad she’s there.
That’s the life she wants, and I want it too. ”
His mother reached across the low table and took his massive, scarred hand with her slender, fine-boned one.
“Then build it,” she said. “And bring her back to visit her terrifying mother-in-law often.” Her mouth curved. “I have twenty-five years to make up for. Two days out is close enough for me to be a nuisance about it.”
Across the hall, Amy caught him looking. She lifted a spoon in his direction, triumphantly gesturing at the pan and the no-longer scowling cook and the warm bustle of the morning. She mouthed something that might have been watch this or might have been I love you or might have been both at once.
He smiled back, knowing that his search was over. He wasn’t looking for a place to belong anymore. He was building a home with her.