Epilogue
Six months later…
The pot boiled over, and Amy caught it before the whole thing hissed into the flame, sliding it off the heat with a bare hand and a curse that would have made Pelloq clutch his chest. The thought of Pelloq made her smile.
She’d written to him a month ago—no details, just letting him know she was safe—and Brannik had arranged for it to be delivered through a series of third parties designed to hide their trail. She knew he’d be happy for her.
“Behind you,” Nesk called, ducking past with a tray of clean bowls balanced on one broad shoulder.
He was young, still growing into his four arms, and he treated her small kitchen like the most important place in the settlement.
“Table six wants the fish again. The whole thing. Says he’ll pay double if you do the crust the way you did last week. ”
“Tell table six the crust was an accident and I’ve been trying to reproduce it for six days.” She wiped her forehead with her wrist. “Tell him I’ll do my best.”
“He won’t care if it’s an accident. He’ll eat it either way.”
He would. That was the thing that still surprised her sometimes, in the middle of a shift, in the middle of the steam and the clatter and the smell of proper food cooking—that people came here on purpose.
That they came back. That there was a regular at table six, a grumpy old Vekh freighter captain who’d docked at this settlement forty times over the years and never bothered to learn anyone’s name until hers.
She ran the back of her hand across her forehead again and looked, for a moment, at her hands.
Bare hands. Bare arms. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow because the kitchen ran hot, and there was nothing hiding them, no oversized cloth, no camouflaged skin.
Her hair was pinned up off her neck so it didn’t get in the way, not bound flat and crammed under a cap to be hidden.
Anyone who walked through her dining room would see a human woman, sweaty and flushed and completely herself, running the best kitchen in a two-day radius.
Four years she’d spent making herself into someone nobody would look at twice. Now people crossed a landing field to look at her.
“Amy.” Nesk again, at the pass, lowering his voice in the way the whole staff had learned to do, half warning and half delight. “He’s here.”
She didn’t have to ask who.
The dining room had gone quieter—not silent, because the settlement wasn’t the kind of place where a big male made a room go silent—but quieter, the particular ripple of attention that always moved through a room when Brannik came into it.
She heard the low creak of the floor under a weight it hadn’t been built for.
Someone said his name in greeting, and he gave a short grunt in reply, which from Brannik counted as a warm and lengthy conversation.
She came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron, and there he was.
He filled the doorway the way he filled every doorway, ducking under the lintel out of long habit, straightening to his full enormous height once he was clear.
His black hair was tied back today, off his face, which meant he’d been working.
The freight didn’t care about his mystique the way the settlement did.
His deep bronze skin had a faint metallic sheen under the lamps.
His horns swept back from his temples, and his silver eyes found her across the room the instant he was through the door, the way they always did.
The way they had from the very first, when he was a chained male in a filthy cell lifting his head to watch a kitchen worker carry in a bowl.
She stopped, for just a second, and let herself remember it.
She did that sometimes. She let herself stand in the middle of her own restaurant, in her own body, in the loud warm light of her own life, and remember the cell.
The stink of it. The heavy restraints. The terrifying stillness of him, and the way his eyes had followed her every movement, and the way she’d talked to him because his silence made her nervous, never dreaming—
She hadn’t been able to dream back then because surviving had eaten up all the space where dreams were supposed to go.
Now she had a restaurant, and a Vekh captain who paid double for accidental crust, and a four-armed apprentice who guarded her kitchen like a temple, and neighbors who waved when she passed.
She had a mother-in-law who was, in fact, terrifying, and who they visited once a month for Aurelian tea and firm opinions and her way of looking at Brannik like she still couldn’t believe he was standing there.
She had a family. She’d gathered one up without noticing she was doing it, the way you gather warmth from a fire just standing close enough, for long enough, that one day you realized you weren’t cold anymore.
Brannik crossed the room to her, and people made way.
He didn’t shoulder anyone aside. He’d spent his whole life learning to move his enormous body through spaces that weren’t built for it, and the settlement had learned how to let him.
He reached her at the pass, and he didn’t say a word—he wouldn’t, not in a crowded room—but he reached out one huge hand and closed it around her waist and pulled her against him.
The tension of the day melted out of her spine all at once, the boiled-over pot and the impossible crust and the double-paid captain, gone.
“You smell like fish,” she said into his chest.
“You smell like home,” he said, quietly, just for her.
She tipped her head back to look up at him.
His face was hard and battered and enormous, the same face that had frightened her half to death across a bowl of fake protein.
Looking down at her now, something eased at the corners of that surprising mouth that she’d taught herself to read the way other people read whole sentences.
“You said that like it still surprises you,” she said.
“It does.” He said it plainly. He’d stopped hiding from plain things, months ago, in a small warm room in a mountain.
“Home. I say it and some part of me still—” He stopped, the way he did when the words got too big, and she waited, because she’d learned that waiting was how you got the rest of it.
“I keep expecting to have to leave it. To pack a bag. To find the next ship.” His hand flexed against her waist. “There’s no next ship. ”
“No,” she agreed. “There’s a fish that needs a crust, and a captain who’s watching us right now, and about forty bowls that need washing.”
“That’s not what I want to do with my evening.”
“It’s what I’m doing with my evening.” She patted his chest, right over the slow heavy beat of his heart. “I close in an hour.”
“An hour.” He said it the way another male might say a year.
“An hour, Brannik. There are paying customers in this room.”
“An hour is too long.”
She laughed, and pulled back enough to look at him properly, at the impatience written all over that intimidating face, and she thought—not for the first time—how thoroughly she had this enormous, dangerous, notoriously silent warrior wrapped around her smallest finger, and how much he enjoyed being there.
“You,” she said, “are the least patient male in this entire settlement, and no one would ever believe me if I told them. They all think you’re the strong silent type. ”
“I am.”
“No. You’re the strong impatient type.”
He growled, a low rumbling sound, felt more than heard, that started somewhere deep in that enormous chest and rumbled straight through her where she was pressed against him.
This one held affront, and amusement, and possessiveness, and a promise about the hour after closing that made her face go warm.
But underneath all of it was a kind of helpless besotted patience that said he would, of course, wait the hour.
He would wait ten hours. He would wait however long she needed because she was the one thing he’d wait for.
He said more with that single sound than most males managed with an entire speech, and the corner of his mouth tipped up because he knew she’d heard every word of it.
“Charming,” she said. “Very persuasive. The answer’s still an hour.”
He bent his head. For a moment she thought he was going to try to change her mind, and honestly she wasn’t sure her resolve would survive it. But he didn’t. He just brought his mouth close to her ear, and she felt the warmth of his breath, and she went still and soft and waiting.
“I love you,” he said.
Just that. Plain and easy, the way he said it dozens of times a day now. He said it like it cost him nothing, but she knew exactly what it had cost him once.
For twenty-five years he’d believed saying what he loved aloud gave the universe something to take from him.
Now he said the words over freight manifests and across the breakfast table and into her hair in the dark.
He said them at the edge of a crowded dining room where anyone could hear. And nothing disappeared.
The universe hadn’t punished him. It had given him a restaurant, and a mother, and a settlement that made way for him, and her.
“I love you too,” she said, and he let out a breath against her hair, that small relaxation he only ever allowed with her. “Now go sit down. You’re scaring the paying customers.”
“They’re not scared.”
“Table six is terrified of you.”
“Table six,” Brannik said, straightening, “pays double for your crust and calls you chef. He should be terrified of you.”
She swatted him with the corner of her apron.
He caught her wrist gently, the way he’d caught it that day in the cell when she’d reached for his face.
Except this time he turned her hand over and pressed his mouth to the soft inside of her wrist, right where the pulse was, right where a lifetime ago she’d cleaned a wound and padded a restraint and felt the whole world tip sideways when their skin had touched.
Then he let her go, and sat down in the too-small chair he’d claimed as his months ago, the one Nesk always saved for him whether she asked or not, and he settled in to wait his hour.
He looked enormous and dangerous and out of place among the ordinary crockery, and completely, unmistakably content.
She went back into her kitchen with her steam and her fish and her impossible crust, and picked up her knife, and got to work.
She’d take that hour. Their time would come after closing.
She was, after all, exactly where she wanted to be.