Chapter 4
KAZAN
I now understood how a woman could drive a bull mad.
The worst part was that Maisie had no idea she was doing it.
I had done everything I could to give her space. To remember that she might still leave. That this might not be permanent. That she had come here under circumstances I did not fully understand and could not ignore.
Nezara’s courier arrived after Maisie fell asleep with an addendum to our contract.
The agreement was mostly standard. I had seen enough bride contracts to know the shape of them, even if I’d never expected to sign one myself.
There was only one change that mattered.
I was not to touch her.
Not to take her to bed or to claim her. Not to do anything that could make the arrangement harder to reverse.
The words were neat. Legal. Bloodless.
They did not mention what Maisie wanted. Not once.
That told me everything I needed to know.
The Alien Matchmaking Agency didn’t care if she was safe. They did not care if she was happy. They cared about the mark on her file, and whether some official on Earth might start asking questions.
They cared about liability. About reversals.
About keeping the merchandise unaltered until they decided what to do with it.
Merchandise.
My hand closed around the paper before I thought better of it. It crumpled in my fist, and I had to force myself to smooth it out again.
I might need it later.
That didn’t make me want to tear it in half any less.
I had heard men in the arena speak about fighters that way. Assets. Bodies. Muscle and bone with a price attached. I had killed men for using those words while looking at me.
Now someone had written them around Maisie without ever saying them outright.
It made something old and ugly stir in my chest.
I pushed the paper away before I did something useless with it.
Then my mind betrayed me.
It went exactly where the contract forbade it to go. To Maisie’s mouth. Her hands. The soft shape of her body under the shirt she had stolen from my room. To the idea of lifting her onto my counter and stepping between her thighs.
Need hit hard enough that my fingers curled against the table.
I stopped the thought there.
Barely.
She was in the next room. In my kitchen. In my shirt.
That was dangerous enough.
Maisie had woken less than twenty minutes ago and refused to let me feed her. I had offered. More than once. She’d looked at me with those tired, stubborn eyes and told me she wanted to do something.
So now she stood at my stove, sleeves rolled to her elbows, the hem of my shirt hanging past her knees. She had to stretch to reach the iron skillet. The sight should not have done anything to me.
It did.
She fried strips of cured goat and warmed slices of fig in the fat. Steam curled around her face, and one loose strand of hair stuck to her cheek. She kept pushing it back with the side of her wrist.
She looked like she belonged there.
In my kitchen.
In my home.
The thought landed too hard.
I looked away.
I wanted to wait on her. To bring her food. Clothes. Anything she wanted. I wanted to make sure she never had to ask for a single thing.
She would not accept that from me yet.
So I sat at my own table, too large for her and barely large enough for me, and let her cook.
It felt like surrender.
It also felt like a gift.
“Will you show me the orchard?” Maisie asked later.
She had a bite of fig between her fingers. Her lips shone with juice.
I looked at my plate.
“Yes.” It was only one word. It still came out too rough.
The orchard wasn’t far from the house. Morning clung to everything, cold and damp.
Dew soaked the grass, and mist still hung low against the hills.
I led her past the woodshed and the goat pen.
Two of the goats lifted their heads as we passed, watching Maisie with more interest than they had ever shown me.
Sensible animals.
We went through the gap in the stone wall, and the trees rose ahead of us in rows. Violet leaves, dark with moisture. Heavy fruit. Gold just beginning to show through the green.
This was mine.
Not given to me because I had fought well. Not tossed to me as a reward to keep me quiet. This wasn’t a cage with prettier walls.
Mine.
I had planted some of these trees myself. Pruned them. Bled on the roots when I was too tired to notice my hands were torn. Watched them survive storms I thought would take the whole hillside.
I had built this.
I had broken many things before. Men. Gates. Chains. An arena.
This was different.
Maisie looked around with wide eyes. “It’s so big.” She glanced at me, and her mouth twitched. “And not just because you’re a minotaur.”
“It’s not even the largest orchard in town.” I bent to pull a weed from the base of a trunk.
The weed didn’t matter. My hands needed something to do.
“I guess you don’t know what Earth is like.” She brushed her fingers over the bark. “It’s all corporate farms or places made to look pretty for tourists. I’ve never been to an orchard before.” Sap clung to her fingertips. She licked it off.
My body went tight.
I looked at the weed in my hand as if it had personally offended me.
“Was it hard to leave?” I asked.
I didn’t know why I asked. Maybe because I wanted to know what had hurt her. Maybe because I wanted to know if she missed it.
Maybe because some selfish part of me needed to know what might call her back.
Maisie sighed, and the sound turned into a groan. “There was this guy.”
Every muscle in my body went still.
I did not speak.
A frightened creature gave more if you did not reach too quickly. I knew that much. I had been one once.
“James,” she said. “My ex. It had been going bad for a long time. You think you know controlling? This guy was an expert.” She made a face and looked down the row of trees. “I signed up for all of this to get away from him. I mean, they say the best way to get over one guy is to get under—”
She stopped, and her cheeks turned pink.
I had never wanted an explanation for an Earth saying more in my life.
She cleared her throat. “Anyway. What about you? How did you end up here? This isn’t your home planet, is it? Everything looks kind of new.”
I let her change the subject.
For now.
“I was a gladiator on Protos,” I said. “We rebelled. We won. They gave us this land so we would stop destroying things.”
Maisie stared at me. Then she said, “I take back what I said about controlling exes.”
I laughed.
The sound surprised me. Hers came a second later, bright and unguarded, and that was worse.
It went through me.
For one breath, she didn’t look like a woman waiting for the next blow. She looked young. Amused. Almost happy.
Then what she had said settled in.
James.
A male had hurt her badly enough that she had crossed the galaxy to escape him. Badly enough that even now, standing in a quiet orchard with the sun trying to burn through the mist, she watched for traps in every kindness.
The old part of me lifted its head.
I wanted to find him.
I wanted to put one hand around his throat and teach him exactly how fragile a controlling male could be.
I knew the lesson well. I had taught it in sand, in blood, in front of roaring crowds.
But if not for him, Maisie would not be here.
That did not make me grateful.
It only made the rage more complicated.
I looked at her instead of the path. She was walking carefully between the rows, fingers trailing over leaves when she thought I wasn’t watching. My shirt swallowed her. My land surrounded her. Her scent drifted back to me, warm and sweet beneath the green smell of the trees.
There was only one explanation.
Mate.
The word struck with the force of a blade between the ribs.
I should have known it earlier. Maybe I had in the first moment at the spaceport, when every part of me had turned toward her before I understood why. At the first breath of her scent.
From the immediate, impossible certainty that she mattered.
The elders had spoken of this. So had the arena breeders, though they used colder words. Biological attachment. Pairing instinct. A flaw they had tried to cut out of us because mated males were harder to control.
They had failed.
Maisie was my mate.
And I couldn’t tell her.
The urge was there. Brutal. Simple.
Mine.
It was a fact in my bones.
It was also a threat.
She had just told me about a male who had treated her like property. If I turned to her now and spoke of bonds and fate and belonging, she would not hear reverence. She would hear James. She would hear another cage closing.
I had fought too hard for my own freedom to steal hers.
Even if every instinct I possessed demanded it.
So I said nothing.
We walked between the trees, and for a while the silence was not sharp. That was new. Maisie’s shoulder brushed near my arm once. Then her hand brushed mine.
The first time might have been an accident.
The second was not.
Her fingers slid into my palm.
I stopped breathing.
She didn’t look at me. She kept walking, her face turned toward the trees, as if holding my hand was nothing. As if it did not tear something open in me.
I closed my hand around hers carefully.
She was small. Too small. Every bone felt delicate beneath my fingers, and I had to remind myself that holding was not the same as gripping.
She stayed.
That shouldn’t have felt like victory.
But it did.
Near the top of the rise, she stopped beneath a tree heavy with gold fruit and reached up. She couldn’t quite get it.
I could have let her try longer. Instead, I plucked the fruit and set it in her hand.
She smiled at me, and I forgot what I had meant to do next.
Then she bit into it. Juice gathered at the corner of her mouth. A bead of sap clung to her lower lip.
I lifted my hand.
Slowly.
She watched me. Her eyes widened, but she did not flinch. She didn’t move away.
I brushed my thumb over her lip and wiped the sweetness away. Her skin was soft. That was all it took.
My body reacted like the touch was a command. Heat punched through me, hard and sudden, and I locked every muscle to keep from pulling her against me.
Maisie looked up. The wariness was still there. Buried, but not gone.
So was something else.
Need.
Not mine.
Hers.
That was the only warning I got before she rose onto her toes, fisted one hand in my flannel, and pressed her mouth to mine.
For half a breath, I let her have the kiss.
Then my control snapped.
I caught her against me, one arm around her back, my other hand at her thigh. She weighed almost nothing. I lifted her and turned, pressing her gently against the trunk of the fig tree so the bark would not scrape her back.
Her mouth opened beneath mine. The sound she made was small and desperate, and nearly ended me. Her hands went into my hair. Down my neck. Then her fingers found the base of one horn.
Pleasure hit bright and vicious.
I growled into her mouth.
The rut rose hard.
Too hard.
My hips pinned hers. My teeth grazed her lower lip, and she arched against me like she wanted more. Every instinct I had turned simple and violent.
Take.
Claim.
Mate.
Mine.
The word pounded through me until there was no room for anything else.
And that was why I stopped.
Because Maisie did not know.
Because forever was not mine to take from her.
Because I would rather carve the want out of myself than become another male who decided what she belonged to.
I tore my mouth from hers.
It took more strength than breaking chains.
I set her down slowly, my hands shaking on her waist. Then I stepped back.
Cold air moved between us. It didn’t help.
Maisie blinked up at me. Her lips were swollen. Her breathing was uneven. She looked confused and hurt, and still hungry enough to drag me back under.
“You should go back to the house,” I said. The words came out rough. Almost unrecognizable.
Her brow furrowed. “Why?”
Because you are my mate.
Because I want you too much.
Because if you ask me, I will give you everything, and I do not know if I am strong enough to survive it.
I said the only thing I could.
“Because if you don’t, I’m not sure I can stop a second time.”
For one terrible moment, I wanted her to tell me not to.
Instead, Maisie stepped back.
Then she fled.