Chapter 11
CHLOE
The Agency door was propped open with a rock.
I stood in the churned-mud main street and looked at it a beat too long, my heart knocking around like it had somewhere better to be.
In every way that mattered, my trial with Zarcal had ended the night he charged through the wall to get at me and Lorkin put him on the floor to stop him.
You don't stay a man's wife after that. It had been easy enough to leave the whole question alone.
Live in Lorkin's bed. Call it temporary. Refuse to look too hard at the future.
An open door meant I didn't get to do that anymore. I made myself walk through it.
Theeodus was behind the counter.
The entire walk over I'd been promising myself Nezara would be back — Nezara with her soft eyes, who gentled spooked things for a living and had looked at me at intake and said let one of them see you, the real one.
Nezara, I could work.
Nezara knew how to bend.
Theeodus didn't. He was a pale, narrow human in an Agency jumpsuit, the same junior clerk who'd pointed toward the forge my first week and told me kindly not to bother the scary man who lived there.
He had a stack of forms squared off in front of him and the look of someone who had to read all of them and wasn't looking forward to it.
"Chloe." He didn't quite meet my eyes. "We aren't really open. There's a backlog. I'm only in to start on it."
"The door's open." I gave him the smile, the warm one, the one that's gotten me a free drink on three planets. "Theeodus, I am so glad you're here."
I laid it out fast and light and from the side, so the shape of the ask wouldn't land until it was already sitting in the room. The trial with Zarcal was finished. Everyone in town knew it. Zarcal himself, poor wrecked sweetheart, knew it.
Really, all I needed was a switch. I'd be doing the Agency a favor, even, sparing everyone the paperwork of a third failed placement. Match me to Lorkin instead. Two signatures and a tidy little happy ending, and Theeodus could get back to his backlog.
Out loud, I made it small. "How does a person go about changing a placement?"
"Changing?" He blinked at the word.
"Tidying one up." I gave his stack of forms a sympathetic look, like the two of us were on the same side of all that paper. "The Zarcal match is finished. I'd like the file to say so. And then to say something else."
"Something else?"
"Yes."
He didn't reach for a pen. "Placements aren't changed. They complete, or they fail and the bride waits for the next intake." He recited it; there was no other word for it.
"So fail it." I leaned an elbow on the counter. "Quietly. Today. And match me up with Lorkin."
"I can't fail a placement because you'd like me to. Besides, this is already your third placement." He lined the forms up, though they were already straight.
"Nezara would have had it stamped before lunch."
Wrong move. Whoops. Something pinched in his face: he knew to the inch how far short of her he fell, and he didn't love hearing it from a human draped over his counter. "Nezara isn't here. I can't change a contract like that. There's a process. There are forms."
There was a process, and I wanted to set it on fire.
He dropped his voice a note. "Placements don't switch. And before any of that, there's the contact clause."
"The what?"
He wouldn't look up from the forms. "If a bride is found to have been with someone other than the male she's contracted to." Pink climbed his neck. "That isn't a failed placement. It's a breach of contract."
"And a breach is..."
"Different." He squared the stack that didn't need squaring. "The bride would be removed. Of course, we investigate these claims seriously, we wouldn't just remove someone on one man's word, but the removal would be permanent. Infidelity is unacceptable."
He must have read something on my face since he didn't wait for me to ask any follow-ups.
"She would be sent home." His words were quiet. Gentle, even. "There's a transport already inbound. I believe it's the one you will be put on if your contract with Zarcal proves unsuccessful."
For a second the little office went far away and too bright, Theeodus's worried face at the wrong end of it, and I set a hand flat on the counter to keep myself upright without showing it.
Then the words landed, all of it, the part I'd been so careful not to look at.
What I'd been doing with Lorkin every night for days wasn't temporary and it wasn't harmless.
It was no longer just a private matter between the two of us.
On the Agency's paper, it was the one unforgivable move.
It was a one-way seat with my name on it.
What a freaking joke.
I'd spent my whole life certain I was the kind of woman a man had fun with and handed back. Twice over on this planet alone. And the one time somebody had wanted to keep me, wanted me so badly he forgot how to be careful about it, that was the nail in my coffin.
It wasn't the failing that got me. It was being wanted. I'd have laughed if my throat had cooperated.
"I know you are no longer staying with Zarcal." He found his pen at last. "I'll need your current lodging, for the file."
"The blacksmith's end of town, lately." The smile came up on its own, bright and easy.
"He helped me after Zarcal's… episode. Have you met the man?
Fixed a winch for me once, grunted at me twice, and I'm fairly sure he'd sooner eat his own anvil than hold a conversation.
" I shrugged, fond and dismissive. "We're barely roommates. He's just being kind."
He wrote something down, and I worried that I'd said too much.
But it came out easily. Every word of it was me taking the best thing that had ever happened to me and shrinking it down to nothing, in a cold little box of an office, to save my own skin. Lorkin would have understood. He'd have told me to lie bigger.
And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, and it is not a generous one, the light in the doorway changed. A shadow filled it, ducking, because the door was built for people my size and not for him.
"I was just passing by and saw the door was open. Is Nezara around?" Lorkin asked Theeodus.
Then he saw me.
I watched it happen, the exact half second his whole body clocked that I was standing three feet off at the counter. And he did the opposite of what I'd just done.
Nothing in him shut down. Something opened instead, sure and unhurried, the face of a male who'd ducked into a room and found the one thing he'd been hoping was in it.
His weight came toward me before he'd decided to move it.
My name was already on his lips, warm, like I was a thing a person got to be openly glad about, in daylight, in front of the clerk and the pen and the open file.
I held my face bored and put everything I had into one look. Don't.
He stopped. Not all at once. I watched the gladness hit the flat of my stare and not understand it, watched him reach for the why and come up with nothing, and then watched him do the hardest thing there was, which was trust me without it.
The warmth banked. He went still and careful, a big male gone unreadable, waiting on me to tell him the rest.
"Smith." Theeodus gave him the harried politeness he gave everyone. "I'll only be a few minutes. Unless it's urgent?"
"It'll keep." Lorkin's gaze touched me again and slid off. "Morning," he said to me, and put nothing in it, because I'd told him to.
"Morning," I said back, just as empty.
One flat syllable, and the male who'd held me all night was a stranger I half-knew.
It should have been a small thing, pretending not to know somebody.
People manage it all the time. But there's nothing small about standing an arm's length from the male you've been wrapped around every night, holding your face bored and your hands at your sides, while every nerve you own strains toward him, the one warm thing in a freezing room.
I could feel where he was without looking. I always could.
I kept my chin down and my mouth shut and did not look, and it was the hardest performance I've ever turned in, and I once convinced a roomful of people I was having the best night of my life.
He didn't know why I was there. I could see him working it, fast as I had, coming up with nothing good. He'd come for Nezara, for reasons I suspected were similar to mine, and walked into me instead.
I willed him hard not to say my name like it meant anything. Not to look at me at all, not in here. Not in front of the man with the forms.
I barely remember getting out of there. Theeodus was saying something about corporate, and backlogs, and coming back when Nezara returned.
"Of course," I heard myself say, warm as anything.
"Whenever's good. I'm not going anywhere.
" My face did its trick without me. Lorkin said almost nothing at all, and then the propped door was behind us and we were standing in the churned mud of the main street, not touching.
"Walk," he said under his breath. "Meet me past the cider house."
We did one more bit of theater, him one way, me the other, and found each other in the windy gap between the cider house and the butcher.
He put one huge hand flat against the wall beside my head, not touching me, just close, just breathing, and I understood that he wanted to and wouldn't, not here, not where anyone could come around the corner.
"What was that?" he asked low. "You looked at me like I'd put a hand to a hot forge."
"Because you nearly did." I kept it quiet to match him. "You came through that door lit up like it was Christmas. One glad look in front of that clerk and his pen, and I'm gone."
"What are you talking about?"
"It's the stupid contract." I made myself say it plainly, with no patter to hide in. "A bride caught with a male who isn't her intended doesn't get a failed placement and another go. She gets removed, dumped on the next ship out."
It took him a second. Then his face did the thing mine must have done at the counter: the drop, the floor going out.
"They'd take you." Barely a question.
"For us. Yeah." I tried for wry, but my voice cracked.
He was quiet for a moment, and I could practically see his mind churning over options. "We need Zarcal to break the contract before someone realizes..." he didn't need to name what we'd been doing. I could feel his fingers imprinted in places no one would ever see.
"You think he'll do it?"
"I think he owes you that much. Chloe, do--" whatever he was going to ask, he cut himself off.
"What?" I pressed.
But Lorkin just shook his head, his horns casting shadows on the mud underfoot, and we turned towards Zarcal with whatever he was thinking hanging between us.