2. One
"That one," I told Nimue, before the big man in the pit had even won. "That one's ours."
She cinched tight around my throat, which I took as agreement.
Down in the hole, the man was fighting a boar with his bare hands. It changed nothing. I'd already claimed him. He just didn't know yet.
The Javelinas had fenced off an old drainage basin with chain link and bolted truck hoods on where the chain link ran out.
It smelled like pig shit and gasoline and forty guys who'd been drinking since noon.
Real class operation. The boar came nearly to the man's hip, a hundred and eighty pounds of bad temper with its tusks filed to points because God's version wasn't stabby enough.
The man outweighed it, but not by enough to make the tusks harmless.
He was bleeding, and an iron cuff around one ankle ran back to a chain bolted into the dirt.
The chain was long enough to let him cross the pit, but too short to let him reach the fence or any of the men above it.
One guy ran the show, and he wasn't hard to find.
The others orbited him like he had his own weather.
The money went into his hand and nobody else's.
He wore a string of filed boar tusks around his neck and kept touching them while he watched, petting them like he'd earned them instead of shooting something in a pen that couldn't run.
One of the men beside him called him Zaroff. I wondered if he'd picked the name himself.
The boar came at the big man low, head down.
He should have moved. He planted his feet instead and took the charge into his chest. It drove him back hard enough to snap the chain straight.
One tusk opened his forearm. He caught the animal behind the jaw and shoulder, turned with it, and used the rest of its charge to drive its head into one of the truck hoods bolted around the pit.
Metal clanged.
The boar staggered. The big man went down with it, one knee behind the skull, both hands locked around the head. It thrashed hard enough to drag him through the dirt. He held on, tightening his arms around its neck until the animal stopped moving under him.
The crowd cheered.
By then I was hard as a rock and already in love.
I'd watched men kill with their hands my whole life. I'd done it myself and slept fine. I had never seen anybody do it like that, all that force spent without hurry or anger. I wanted those hands on me. I wanted to know if he'd be that patient with me underneath them.
He stood over the boar with his chest heaving and his arm running red. Then he crouched and laid one hand against its side.
Gently.
Like an apology.
Not the killing. That. That's the one that got me.
I'd already called it. That soft, pointless thing just meant I wasn't going to be able to take it back.
Mine.
The want came up right behind it, filthy and in a hurry. I wanted to fuck him. I wanted to bite him. I wanted to get him somewhere quiet and find out how many other impossible things fit inside that body.
Nimue lifted her head from under my jaw and tasted the air.
"Yeah," I told her, scratching under her chin. "I saw him first. Don't start."
They didn't let him breathe. Two Javelinas came over the chain link with zip ties and a second length of chain. One unlocked the cuff from the ground bolt. The big man could have broken both of them before they got close enough to touch him.
Instead, he held out his wrists, almost courteously.
My mouth went dry.
The boar, I understood. A man who fought like that had not run out of fight. He was choosing not to spend one coin of it on himself, and that did something worse to me than the killing had.
I wanted to be the one holding the other end of that chain. I wanted him on his knees, looking up at me with that same patience while I took my time deciding what to do with him.
I'd work that out later once I had him somewhere with a door I could close.
So I waited.
The crowd thinned toward the coolers. Money changed hands. Zaroff stood on a wooden crate counting his take while the big man disappeared into a livestock pen across the lot.
They parked one genius on a folding chair outside the pen with a shotgun across his knees. He lasted twelve minutes before the beer caught up with him. He looked toward the trailers, found nobody watching, and propped the shotgun against the chair before walking into the scrub.
I slid off the ledge and followed.
He stopped twenty feet in, facing away from the lot, and opened his jeans. The sound of piss hitting dry ground covered my first few steps. The crowd covered the rest.
I came up behind him and clamped one hand over his mouth. His whole body locked. Before he could decide whether to fight or scream, I drove my knife in under his ear and pulled it forward.
He jerked once against me. Hot piss splashed against my boot. Then his knees gave.
I lowered him into the scrub instead of letting him fall, careful not to snap any branches. More consideration than he deserved, but I was in a good mood. Everybody catches the spillover when I get like that.
I went through his pockets and found the cage keys. "Gracias, amigo."
The nearest trailer wasn't locked. Nobody robbed the Javelinas except for, apparently, me.
Inside, a row of key fobs hung on pegboard between a county map and a calendar stuck three years deep on the same topless month.
I took everything that looked like it went to a bike and let myself out.
I only realized I was humming when Nimue flicked her tongue against my jaw like I was embarrassing her.
The pen sat across open ground, and the big man watched me come the whole way.
I took my time so he could get a good look at what was walking toward him. Not much of me, and what there was had another man's blood on it to the wrist and a snake around its neck. People usually pick one thing to be scared of. I like to give them options.
When I reached the cage, I dropped into a crouch with my wrists resting on my knees and cocked my head. "?Hablas inglés?"
"English, Spanish, and a little Diné Bizaad."
I grinned. "Good."
Up close, he looked worse.
Gray threaded through his beard, and the years sat deep at the corners of his eyes.
He was fifty at least, probably past it, with big scarred hands that had been used hard for longer than I'd been alive.
He held himself like a man waiting for the next thing.
Not braced for it. Just waiting. I didn't have a word for what that was, and not having one bothered me more than it should have.
Seeing it didn't cool what I wanted. It poured gas on it.
The chain ran from his wrists to a ring welded into the back wall. I unlocked the cage and stepped inside.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"You."
I tried the first key on his cuffs. Wrong one.
"What for?"
"Not for fighting boars."
The second key turned.
His wrists came free, but he didn't move. He rubbed one thumb across the raw skin where the metal had sat and watched me.
Nimue lifted her head to get a look at him. I braced for the flinch. Grown men have screamed about Nimue.
He tipped his chin at her like they were being introduced across a table. "She yours?"
"She's her own. She lets me carry her around so she can see more of the world."
His lips twitched like he wasn't sure if he was allowed to smile.
I unlocked the cuff around his ankle and pulled the gate open wider. "Well? You want out or not?"
"That depends on what you plan to do with me, little one."
Little one.
The words sent gooseflesh down both arms.
I'd put men twice my size down without my pulse changing. This chained giant looked at me with that patient, ruined face and called me little one, and my body went for it before I'd cleared a single part of it to go anywhere.
"You got anything against horses?" I asked, like my pulse wasn't beating in my throat. "I work a ranch. I live near it. Could use a big, handsome guy like you around the place. Not that that's why I'm cutting you loose. That part's free. Room and board we sort out with the boss when we get there."
He studied me, looking for the catch.
Smart.
"What happens when you get tired of me?"
Nobody had ever asked me that. I'd never gotten tired of anything I decided to keep, and I'd never had to say it out loud, and standing in a dead man's cage I couldn't think of a way to prove it to a man who'd been sold before.
"Guess you'll have to stick around and find out."
He thought about it longer than I liked. Then he came through the gate and followed me.
We were a stone's throw from the fence when three Javelinas came around the trucks. Two were empty-handed. One had a rifle slung lazily over his shoulder. All three were drunk enough to be slow and nowhere near drunk enough to be safe.
"The one with the rifle," I said quietly. "He's yours. Put him down, and the other two are mine."
The big man stopped.
"I can't."
I looked up at him. "Can't what?"
"Hurt him. Not on purpose." He held my eyes. "Don't ask me to hurt a man on purpose, little one. I can't."
A giant who could kill a boar with his bare hands, who wouldn't hurt his own captors. It didn't compute. I decided it didn't have to. He didn't have to be built for killing.
I was.
They spread out as they came closer, the rifleman hanging back half a step while the other two walked ahead of him. Not trained, then. Just sober enough to remember a gun worked better with bodies between it and the problem.
The first man opened his mouth.
I caught him by the shoulder, turned him into the rifleman's line, and opened his throat. Blood sprayed hot across my hand. He grabbed for the cut with both palms, making a wet sound where the shout should have been, and I shoved him backward.
The second man jumped away from the body and reached under his shirt.
I went with him, stabbing him in the side of his neck before his hand cleared his waistband. I felt the point strike something hard, turned my wrist, and pulled free. He folded around the wound and dropped.
The rifleman finally got his weapon off his shoulder.
He swung the barrel toward me. I knocked it wide with my forearm and stepped in before he could bring it back. My fist caught him under the jaw. His teeth snapped together, and his head went back, but he kept his grip.
I drove my other fist into his gut. The air left him in a grunt. His fingers loosened, and I tore the rifle away, reversed it, and brought the stock across his temple.
He dropped to one knee.
His hand went straight for the knife strapped to his ankle.
Persistent bastard.
I caught the rifle in both hands and swung it down behind his ear. He hit the gravel face-first and stopped reaching.
Four dead Javelinas in one night. They were going to take that personally.
I wiped the knife on the first man's shirt and straightened.
The big man was staring at me.
I beamed back at him.
"You're hurt," he said.
I looked down. My knuckles were split. I hadn't felt it and wouldn't for an hour. "It's nothing."
"Let me see."
He reached for my hand.
"Later." I was already moving toward the bikes because if he got those hands on me right then, I was going to bite him. I was going to find out whether the gentleness held with my teeth in it, right there with four men cooling in the gravel.
"We need to leave before somebody trips over their friends."
The Sportster caught on a fob I'd nearly left on the board. It was beat to hell and dropped at least once, but she turned over when I kicked her. Tusks were wired to the handlebars, filed to points.
Out of the whole row of bikes, I'd stolen Zaroff's personal ride. He'd want her back.
Good. I'd love for him to come and ask.
I swung a leg over and looked back. "Get on."
The big man climbed on behind me, and the suspension sank under his weight. His hands settled carefully at my hips, like he wasn't sure he was allowed.
Of course he was.
Touch me anywhere and quit being careful about it.
I drove us toward the road with his palms burning through my jeans. I shifted on the seat to make room and nearly put us in a ditch.
Back by the pens, Zaroff had come to stand over the guard I'd left in the scrub. He stepped across the body and put himself square in my sightline. Then he lifted two fingers from the tusks at his throat and tipped them toward me in a small salute.
I flipped him off and opened the throttle. "Hold on."
The big man held on.
When the speed came up, his arms wrapped all the way around me. My hand came off the grip to move his, and I put it back before it got there. That was the whole ride. Me negotiating with my own hands.
"What do they call you?" he asked near my ear.
"Percy." The name left my mouth before I decided to give it to him. Nobody got that name but the wind, the water, my mamma, and Sierra, and my mamma was dead. "People who know me call me Coyote."
He thought about it. "Fits."
His forearm crossed my stomach like it had always lived there. "What about you?"
"John. Most people land on Big John."
"Can't imagine why."
He laughed, and I felt it come up my spine before I heard it, everywhere his chest met my back.
"They'll come looking," he said after a while. "Men like that don't let go."
"Neither do I."
His arms tightened. "You're not worried."
"I'm always worried. Never once slowed me down."
I leaned back until my mouth was close enough to his jaw that he could feel the words move against it.
"Besides. You're mine now, Big John. I take care of what's mine."
He went still against my back. I felt his breath stop and the exact second those words dropped into him.
"Yours?" he said finally, trying the word.
"Yeah."
He was quiet long enough that I started building in the dark behind my eyes. The room I'd put him in. The door I'd leave open. The things I wanted to do once he was healed enough to hold on to me properly.
"I don't want anybody dying on my account," he said.
"Then don't try to run."
He hesitated for a second. Then both arms tightened around me, and he put his mouth close to my ear. "I won't run from you, little one."
God help me, I believed him.
I opened the throttle and took him home.