Chapter 8
LORKIN
I woke with Chloe's weight on my chest and didn't move, in case moving was the thing that ended it.
She was asleep on top of me, naked, one leg thrown over both of mine, her cheek over my heart and her dark hair everywhere.
The first thing I did, before I was even properly awake, was hold my breath.
If I moved, she might wake, and if she woke, the whole night might turn out to be the kind of thing a male like me only gets when he dreams.
So I lay there in the gray light and made myself look at the evidence. The ache in my back from a bed built for one. A bite mark coming up sore on my shoulder. Her breathing slow against my ribs, drooling a little on my chest, which no dream of mine had ever been good enough to invent.
It happened. I'd had her. All night, and half of it twice.
Two weeks I'd spent crushing this flat every hour, telling myself it would ruin her, telling myself a better male would do better by her, and the whole time it had been waiting on the other side of one word.
One yes. Hers.
I'd never have had the nerve for it myself. My cock remembered all of it at once and stirred against her hip, hopeful and stupid, and I had to lie very still and think about cold iron until it gave up.
I'd spent my whole life being careful not to want anything I couldn't keep. And now I'd had her, and there was no putting it back.
Whatever came, I wasn't going to be able to hand this one off and walk into the dark like it cost me nothing. That door was shut. She'd shut it herself, climbing into my lap with a mug of cocoa going cold on the table.
Which left the fear. It rose up under the wanting, cold and patient.
There was a list somewhere with her name on it and a date beside it, and a transport that came whether or not I'd learned how to be happy overnight.
There was the wall in the forge, with blades hung against a war nobody else believed was coming, and the kind of male who builds a thing like that is not the kind you trust with something breakable.
And under both of those, the oldest fear, too plain to dress up. She'd had two husbands already hand her back. I'd spent my life learning the exact shape of what I was good for, and gentle had never once been part of it.
Chloe shifted, burrowed, and jammed both feet flat between my thighs.
They were freezing. Two slabs of ice against the most defenseless part of me, and I came up off the bed with a sound nobody in the arena had ever gotten out of me.
"Stars—"
"Mm." She didn't open her eyes. "You're warm. I'm keeping these here."
"They're like river stones."
"Mm-hm." She wriggled them in deeper, smug, then cracked one eye at me. "You're thinking so loud you woke me up, and it's not even properly light. What's the matter with you?"
"Nothing."
"You've got the face." She propped her chin on my sternum and looked at me, rumpled and unbothered and close enough to count the freckles the sun had put across her nose. "You're lying in bed next to a naked woman and you've still found something to brood about. That's almost impressive."
I didn't have a clean way to ask it, so I asked it roughly. "Do you regret it? Last night."
The teasing slid off her face. What came up under it was careful, guarded, and for a breath I braced for the answer I had coming.
Then she leaned up and kissed me, slow and morning-soft.
"It was the best last night ever," she said against my mouth.
Last.
She kept putting that word in front of things. Last night. As if she'd already gone through and decided which things she didn't get to keep.
I wanted to tell her there was nothing last about it, that I'd torn the whole calendar up in the dark while she slept. I kept my mouth shut. Keeping her wasn't mine to swear to yet, and I'd sooner take my own hand off at the wrist than promise her something and let her watch it be untrue.
She must have felt me start to sink. Chloe turned the moment before it could turn on her. She sat up, swung a leg over, and settled astride me with her hands flat on my chest and that grin sliding back into place, the one that had undone me the first night.
"Stop thinking," she said. "You've got one job this morning, blacksmith. Give me the best last morning ever."
I put my hands on her and gave her everything I had and didn't think about anything at all, for a good while.
I went into town after, once she'd fallen asleep again. There was a thing I had to do before the nerve went out of me.
I'd decided it somewhere in the night, with her heartbeat under my hand. I was going to walk into the Agency office and tell Nezara to put me down for the rest of it. Zarcal's trial had a stretch of days left on the rolls before the placement closed and the transport came due.
It was a simple request: Strike his name, write mine. Let the clock run toward me instead of toward a ship.
I didn't know if she'd let me. Frankly, I didn't know if Nezara could, or if the rules bent that way at all. I knew only that I'd rather stand in that prefab box and make a fool of myself than lie next to Chloe one more night and know she would be gone in a blink.
It wasn't claiming her. I told myself that the whole walk in, past the shuttered market stalls and the wood-sled ruts, the morning mist still burning off the street. It was only keeping a door open. A male can hold one open for someone without asking to walk through it.
The office was waiting for me, the off-world prefab crammed in between the apothecary and the cider house, looking wrong against all that dark timber. There was a paper fixed to the door.
Agency office closed. Reopening in seven days. Take urgent matters to the courthouse.
I read it twice.
Relief went through me first, shameful and quick. I didn't have to say it out loud yet, didn't have to stand in front of Nezara's watchful eyes and find out how the words sounded coming out of me.
Then the cold came in behind it.
The office was shut for seven days, and the clock did not pause with it. Somewhere a transport kept its own schedule, and the one door that might close this thing in Chloe's favor was barred for a week. And I stood in the street with the fix in my mouth and nowhere to put it.
"You look like a male on a mission."
Remmen came up from the street unhurried, in the long pressed coat that announced, to anyone looking, that we lived in a town now and not a gladiator camp.
His horns swept up tall, the curved points capped in worked silver.
A folio under one arm, and that politician's warmth on his face that cost him nothing to wear.
"The office is shut," I said.
"It is," he agreed. "Nezara's at the courthouse all week. There's paperwork, after the business at Zarcal's. The kind that goes up the line." He watched me as he said it. "Off-world likes to know when one of us puts a hand on a human bride."
"That wasn't what happened." I heard my own voice flatten. "Don't let it get written up wrong, Remmen. Zarcal went back to the pits in his own head and he didn't come out. If I'd been five minutes slower there'd be a dead woman in his kitchen instead of a hole in the wall."
The warmth left his face. "I read the report."
"Then you know it isn't only Zarcal." I didn't want to say the rest, but said it anyway.
"We came off those transports five years ago and built a town.
We told ourselves the war was over when the bloodshed stopped.
It isn't over. It went quiet and moved indoors.
You keep putting fragile little humans into houses with males who wake up swinging, and one of these days you'll bury one of them. "
He didn't argue. That was the unnerving thing about Remmen. He never argued when it counted. "What do you want me to do about it?"
"Find someone who knows how to mend the part of us the arena broke.
Not bones. The other part. Put them on the town's coin and make it a thing a male can walk into with no one calling him soft for it.
" I shrugged, already uncomfortable with the size of what I'd said.
"Zarcal would have gone. Years back, if there'd been a door to walk through. "
Remmen looked at me a moment longer than the conversation needed.
"That's the most you've said to me in a year," he said.
"Don't get used to it."
"I'll look into it." He didn't make it sound like a politician saying it, which from Remmen was nearly alarming. He tucked the folio tighter. "Go home, Lorkin. You've got the look of a male with somewhere better to be."
Stars help me, I did.
The cottage was too quiet when I came back.
Chloe was sitting on the edge of my bed, dressed, her hair pulled back, and there was a bag at her feet. A big one, full and buckled. Not the little Agency satchel. The whole of her, packed.
"I walked over to Zarcal's while you were out," she said before I could get a word in. "I got my things. The house is—" She stopped, started over. "Somebody should fix his wall before he comes home. He shouldn't have to walk in and see that."
Even now. Even packed and braced for the worst, worrying about his well-being.
She had her hands folded in her lap, very still, the grin nowhere in sight. "Is it time?" she asked. "You can give it to me straight. Do I wait for the ship here, or do I save us both the hassle and take myself to the port?"
She'd packed her whole life into one bag and carried it across town, past the wall a male had nearly killed her through.
She'd come back to sit on my bed and ask me, polite as anything, to confirm she was being sent away.
That was the only ending she'd ever been given.
You get the good night, and then you get the bag and the door.
I crossed the room. I picked the bag up off the bed and dropped it over the far side, out of sight, where neither of us had to look at it.
Then I took her face in both my hands, gentle as I knew how, and tipped it up to mine.
"You're not going anywhere," I said.
And before she could find one reason I was wrong, before that quick mouth could talk us both back out of it, I kissed her.