Chapter 8
KAZAN
Maisie was still asleep when I woke.
She was tucked against me, her back to my chest, one hand loose against my forearm where I’d held her through the night. Her breathing was slow. The cuts on her palm had scabbed over, and her hair had worked its way across my arm and the blanket and, somehow, into my mouth.
I didn’t move.
Moving would wake her. Waking her would mean the morning had started, and I wasn’t ready for that.
Outside the window, the orchard was quiet after the storm. Water still clung to the branches of the star-fig trees. The house was quiet, too, in a way it had never been before. I’d slept in this bed for years. I’d woken in it after bad weather, bad dreams, and terrible memories.
I had never woken with a mate in my arms.
I’d been made for the pits. That was what I’d been told, and for a long time, that was all I’d been.
The Bastion. A thing with fists. A thing that survived.
Females had been kept separate and managed by people who thought bloodlines were their property.
There had been no mornings like this. No soft hair against my mouth.
No small warm body breathing beside me, like she trusted me to keep the world away.
A week ago, I’d stood at the spaceport and told myself I didn’t want any of this.
I’d been wrong.
Maisie stirred. I felt the change in her before she opened her eyes. Her body went still first. Then her breath caught. Then, slowly, she remembered where she was and who was around her, and some of the tension eased.
“It’s early,” I said.
She made a small sound and turned in my arm until she faced me. For one second, her eyes were soft.
Then she remembered something.
Her expression changed. Not fear. Calculation. I knew that look now. Maisie did sums when she was frightened. She looked for the damage before it arrived.
“Kazan,” she said carefully. “Last night.”
“I remember last night.” My voice was low. “I don’t regret it. If you do, tell me.”
“That’s not the problem.” She gave a short breath that wasn’t a laugh.
“No. I don’t regret it. That’s the problem.
” She put her hand against my chest. “The contract says you aren’t allowed to touch me.
I read it. There was a whole paragraph. And I let you.
I asked you. If anyone finds out, they’ll take me off Ceres-9, and they’ll come after you. Your land. Everything.”
I looked at her hand on my chest. The scabs across her palm were dark against her skin.
“I’m a liability,” she said. “I figured it all out at three in the morning.”
Of course she had.
Last night, she’d tried to remove herself from my life because she thought that would make things easier for me. Now she was in my bed, doubting herself.
The old part of me wanted to answer that by finding someone to hurt. James. The hunter. Whoever had written that contract and decided my hands were safer when they were bound by law than when they were gentle.
But that wouldn’t help her.
I lifted my hand and touched her face. Carefully. She let me.
“You’re not a liability,” I said.
“That’s sweet, but it isn’t accurate.”
“It is accurate.” I kept my thumb against her cheek and waited until she looked at me. “The contract is a nuisance. James is a problem. The Agency may be a problem. You are not.”
Her mouth tightened.
“I know what a hefty price is,” I said. “I’ve paid enough of them. You aren’t one.”
“That doesn’t make the stupid chastity clause disappear.”
“No,” I admitted. “It doesn’t.”
She seemed steadier when I said that. Maybe she’d expected me to dismiss it. I wouldn’t. The danger was real. Pretending otherwise would insult both of us.
“We’ll deal with it,” I said.
“How?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It’s honest.”
That earned me a small look. Not a smile, but close enough that I took it as a victory.
I kissed her forehead before I could think better of it. She closed her eyes for half a breath, and I felt the bond pull hard in my chest.
Mate.
The word was there. It had been there since the spaceport, whether I’d understood it then or not.
I could have told her. I could have explained that this wasn’t a trial to me.
That my kind didn’t feel this more than once.
That if the Agency thought a clause in a file could change what she was to me, the Agency was more foolish than I’d already believed.
But she’d spent years with a man who’d used words like chains. If I told her she was my mate now, the morning after she’d given herself to me, she might not hear what I was truly saying.
I wouldn’t do that to her.
Not yet.
So I kept the word behind my teeth and kissed her instead. Once. Softly. Then I let her go.
Eventually, we got out of bed. She put on one of my flannels because her clothes were in no shape for breakfast. It fell past her knees, and she had to roll the sleeves several times before her hands appeared.
I watched her do it.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing,” she pursed her lips.
A satisfied sound escaped from my chest. “It’s my shirt.”
“I’m aware.”
“It looks better on you.”
Her cheeks flushed, and she looked away as if the window had become very interesting. I should have stopped there. I didn’t.
In the kitchen, she sat at the table with both hands around a mug of coffee. Her bare feet were tucked beneath her on the chair. I cut into a star-fig and stood at the counter to eat it.
She glanced at the counter, then at me.
I remembered last night. So did she.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re looking at me,” it was an accusation.
I considered that. “You are a wonderful thing to look at.”
She threw a dish towel at me. It didn’t make it halfway across the room. I laughed, and after a second, so did she.
Then the porch steps groaned.
The sound ended the morning.
I knew that tread. Lorkin was too heavy to tiptoe, and too practical to try. By the time he knocked, I was already at the door.
He stood on the porch with soot still caught in the creases of his hide. His horns nearly touched the top of the frame, though I’d built the doorway high enough for our kind. His expression told me the news was bad before he opened his mouth.
Then he looked past me.
Maisie sat at the table in my shirt, her hair loose, her mug in her hands. There was no reasonable explanation for any of it. Lorkin saw that. He saw too much.
His jaw tightened once, but he said nothing.
That was friendship.
“You’ll want to sit,” he said. “Both of you.”
He came inside and closed the door behind him. Maisie set down her mug. She had gone still again.
“The hunter’s handled,” Lorkin said. “He’s off-world by now. He won’t come back.”
Maisie’s hand tightened around the mug.
He turned his attention to me. “I went into New Knossos last night after I dealt with him. Stopped at the Agency. Nezara had information.”
“What information?” I asked, even if I didn’t want to know.
“The complaint was already filed.”
Maisie was frozen where she sat. “James.”
“Yes. Breach of promise. The hunter logged it formally with Nezara the day he landed. Then he registered it with the off-world Agency network the same hour.” Lorkin’s mouth flattened. “Earth has it now. Once it’s there, it can’t be quietly removed.”
Maisie’s face had gone pale, but her voice was steady. “That asshole.”
“Yes,” Lorkin said. “And they’re sending an auditor.”
The room seemed to narrow.
I knew that word. I knew enough about the bride program to know what it meant, and enough about Earth bureaucracy to know they’d written themselves power wherever they could.
“When?” I asked.
“It will take two weeks.”
Maisie inhaled once. I heard it because I was listening too closely to her and not closely enough to anything else.
“From Earth?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lorkin said. His voice was gentler than usual. That made it worse. “Because of the complaint and because Maisie already had a flag on her file. They’ll inspect the match and decide whether the trial arrangement is in good standing before they rule on James’s claim.”
It was bad enough, but he kept talking.
“If they find evidence that the two of you violated any of the terms of the contract,” he said, “there won’t be a hearing. She’ll be deported immediately. Same day.”
My hands closed around air.
There was no throat to put them around. That was the problem. The hunter was gone. James was off-world. The auditor was still in transit. The Agency was a system, and systems didn’t bleed when you hit them.
Maisie’s scent was on my skin. Mine was on hers. There were marks at her throat that hadn’t been there yesterday. The bed was proof. The kitchen was proof. My shirt on her body was proof.
One night.
We’d had one night, and now it was a weapon pointed at her.
“So we keep it quiet,” Maisie said.
I turned to her.
The fear was still there, but she had moved past it. I’d seen that look once before, when she’d stood in the cidery with a bleeding hand and more courage than sense. She was doing her sums again, but this time she wasn’t subtracting herself.
“It’s just two weeks,” she said. “We make the trial look like a trial. I sleep in the guest room. We keep our hands to ourselves” Her eyes flicked down to the flannel, and she grimaced. “I stop wearing your clothes. We don’t touch where anyone can see. We’re polite. Careful. Nothing more.”
“No.” The word came out before I’d decided to say it.
Maisie looked at me. “Kazan.”
“No.”
“It’s the only way.”
“I won’t have you acting trapped in my house.”
“I’m not trapped. I’m choosing it.”
“That doesn’t make me like it.”
“I don’t need you to like it. I need you to help me stay.”
That stopped me. She knew it, too. I saw it in her face. She’d found the argument I couldn’t refuse.
Lorkin made a low sound. “She’s right.”
I looked at him.
He didn’t apologize. “She is. It’s only two weeks. You both act like the paperwork says you are.” His gaze shifted to Maisie. “Can you do that?”
Her mouth twisted. “Pretend I don’t want what I want so a man with power over me doesn’t use it against me? Yes. I have experience.”
I did not like the calm way she said that.
Lorkin didn’t either. Something in his expression changed. Not pity. He was too blunt for that. But there was respect there now, reluctant and real.
He turned back to me. “I’ll keep watch in town. If anything else comes through the Agency, I’ll know.” He started for the door, then stopped with his hand on the frame.
“You do not know what you’re saying,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose for you it is.”
He left.
The truck started outside a moment later. The sound faded down the road, leaving the house too quiet again.
Maisie looked at her coffee. “It’s cold.”
I crossed to her and crouched beside the chair. It was deliberate. I wanted her above me for once.
I wanted her to know I wasn’t asking her to be smaller. I took her injured hand and turned it palm up.
“Two weeks,” I said.
Her fingers curled slightly against mine. “Can you?”
It was a fair question. The bond in my chest hated the idea already. It wanted her close, wanted my scent on her and hers on me. It wanted every person who came near this farm to know exactly what she was to me.
But I’d spent most of my life learning not to do what I wanted.
“Yes,” I said. “I can.”
She searched my face.
“I can follow the rules,” I added. “You’ve seen me do it.”
That almost made her smile.
I pressed my mouth to her palm, careful of the cuts. “But understand me. This is the last time you make yourself small in this house. We do this to win, not because they own you.”
Her eyes shone, but she didn’t cry.
“I’m not good at being small anymore,” she said.
I stood and held out my hand. After a moment, she took it and let me draw her up from the chair. She came against me willingly, her cheek pressed to my chest. I held her for longer than we could afford.
Then I let go first.
That cost me something. I did it anyway.
“Go wash,” I said. “I’ll change the bedding. We’ll make the guest room look like yours.”
Her expression shifted. Not fear now. Determination. She nodded.
I watched her leave the kitchen, my shirt hanging from her shoulders, her bare feet silent on the floor. In two weeks, a stranger from Earth would stand in my house and decide whether she belonged here.
He would be wrong if he thought that the decision was his.
I’d buried the Bastion because I wanted peace. Now I had trees. I’d built a home, I’d learned how to be gentle because I wanted to be more than the thing they’d made.
But I hadn’t forgotten how to win.
And for Maisie, I would remember everything.