Chapter 6
LORKIN
Kazan got Zarcal up off the floor, taking all his weight, talking low the whole time the way he used to in the holds.
Zarcal moved slow and dazed, letting Kazan steer him.
The sobbing had worn out of him a while back, and the quiet that came after was worse.
He didn't look at the split pantry door.
He didn't look at Chloe. Whatever had come back to him in pieces, he was carrying it out of the house now and not setting it down.
"He'll stay at the orchard," Kazan said to me over Zarcal's bowed head. "However many nights it takes. I'll sit up with him."
Then, quieter, just for me: "Get her out of here tonight, Lorkin. Before he's well enough to come back and stand in his own kitchen and see what he did." He shifted Zarcal's weight. "Take care of Chloe. Maisie would kill me if something happened to her."
I nearly laughed, but it would have come out wrong.
Trusting me with her.
I was the reason she was standing in a torn-open kitchen with a bruise coming up dark on her arm. I'd looked at the best thing that had ever walked toward me and I'd handed it to my friend to take. Holding it myself was the one thing I'd sworn I wouldn't do.
"I've got her," I said.
At the threshold, Zarcal stopped. He turned his head partway, no further, and got two words out in a voice scraped down to nothing.
"I'm sorry."
Not to me, of course. To Chloe. Then Kazan walked him out through the gap where the front door used to hang. I heard the truck door, then the engine. And then the night was just a night, the storm gone, the two of us alone in the wreck.
Chloe had her arms wrapped around herself, shaking, a fine steady tremor that had nothing to do with the cold.
I crossed the room slowly and stopped a little further from her than I wanted to. I made my voice as quiet as it goes, which is not very quiet. "Are you hurt?"
She shook her head. "Is he going to be all right? Out there. Kazan won't be hard on him?"
She was worried about him. After what he'd put her through tonight.
Something in my chest lunged toward her, and I held it down.
Behind it came the old fear, the one I'd carried since the morning I first caught her scent across that office and knew exactly what she was to me.
That I'd given her two weeks with a good man, and she'd fallen for him, and I'd handed away the only thing I ever wanted to keep.
"Kazan won't be hard on him," I said. "Nobody's hard on a man for the war still going in his head."
She nodded, but her eyes had gone back to the broken door, and her hands wouldn't quit.
"He never did one cruel thing to me," she said, wrecked. "Not once, until tonight, and tonight wasn't him." She pressed her lips together. "He built me a bed, Lorkin." She said it like an accusation against herself. "And I still couldn't —"
Her jaw locked on the words.
The question stuck in my throat. I had no right to ask, and I asked anyway, low. "Couldn't what?"
"Feel it." Barely a sound. "Two weeks in his house and I never felt it. There's a room in him with the door shut, and I was never getting in, and I told myself that was fine. That people build a whole life on less than what we had."
"But how do you know you're missing something?" I asked. It came out rough. "How do you know what's supposed to be there?"
She looked up at me; the performance gone all the way off her face. "Just because I didn't feel it with him," she said, "doesn't mean I didn't feel it."
I had no answer to that.
She didn't love him.
A cramped, shameful part of me eased at that, here in the ruin of his kitchen, and I hated it. I held still and let the quiet be all I gave her. Everything else I had to give was wrong.
Then her face did the thing it had been holding off all night. It crumpled. Two tears escaped before she could stop them. She made a furious sound and dragged the back of her wrist across her eyes, angry at them for leaking.
"I hate this," she said, wet and savage.
"I hate that agency. Their forms, their three strikes.
" She bit the rest off. "Two husbands returning me and a monster in the kitchen.
That's the whole story of me out here. That's all of it.
" She laughed, and there was nothing good in it.
"I should be packing. There's no version of tonight where my ticket's not already booked.
Do you think Nezara puts me out at dawn?
" She wasn't really asking me, but she was looking at me when she said it.
"Do I get walked onto the next transport at first light, or will she give me a day? I want to say goodbye to Maisie."
"You're not going on any transport," I said.
"You can't know that."
"Nezara's a reasonable female. She isn't going to lay a man's sickness at your feet. None of this was your doing, and she'll see that."
"She'll see a third failed placement." Chloe said it simply, like she was the one being kind now, sparing me.
"That's all the record sees. It doesn't ask who broke what.
It writes you down and it sends you back.
" She shook her head. "I've been told no by everyone, Lorkin.
Men who were sure and men who were sorry.
They're always very gentle about it. And then you're on the ship anyway. "
I had nothing to put against that. She wasn't wrong about how it usually went, and the truth was I didn't know what Nezara would do, only what I needed her to do.
Chloe turned, and she saw the bed.
The little one in the corner. The one Zarcal had built to her size and set apart from his own, sanded down smooth, the blanket still turned back from that afternoon. A real kindness. The kind of thing that should have been the start of a whole life.
I watched her look at it, and I watched the last of her steadiness go out of her.
"I can't sleep here," she said, quiet, all the savage gone. "I know I have to. It's his house, and I have to be somewhere. But he came through a stone wall to get at me." She put a hand over her mouth, took it away. "How am I supposed to lie down in this room?"
And that was where the rest of my discipline went.
I'd been telling myself a story for two weeks: that the kindest thing I could do was to stay out of her way, mind my fire, hang my knives, and let a better-suited man give her the life I'd decided I would only ruin.
I'd built it brick by careful brick and been proud of how well it held. And it had put her in a kitchen with a man who woke up swinging.
I was done with the story.
"Come to the forge," I said.
She went still.
"There's a back room behind the smithy. The door bars from the inside.
A good one, iron, I made it myself. You take it.
You bar it. Nobody comes through it, not him, not anyone.
I'll sleep out by the fire." I made myself slow down.
"You don't owe me a thing for it. It doesn't have to mean anything you don't want it to mean.
But you're not staying in this house tonight, you're not getting on any transport, and I'm not —"
I'm not handing you to anyone else, ever again. That was the end of the sentence. I didn't say it.
"I'm not leaving you to sleep in the wreck of someone else's worst night," I said instead.
She looked at me for a long moment. I knew that look. I'd worn it myself for years, hunting every gift for the catch in it.
She looked at the bed one more time. Then, at the doorway with no door in it. Then she bent and picked her coat up off the chair where she'd left it before the storm, when this was still a house she lived in.
"Okay," she said. Rough and small, nothing like the woman who'd worked a whole supper table at the orchard. "Okay. That sounds good."