Chapter 12
LORKIN
Infidelity.
The word followed me the whole way across town.
Theeodus hadn't even had the spine to say it to my face.
He'd said it to Chloe, in that cold box with his pink neck and his hornless pale face, and by the time she got it out to me in the wind behind the cider house, it had already done its work on her.
It sat in my chest now and burned and would not bank.
I knew what the word was supposed to mean. It did not touch her. It did not touch the two of us.
A male doesn't break faith with a contract by going home to his mate.
There was no faith there to break that wasn't already mine to keep, and I would have torn the Agency office off its clean little footings brick by brick for putting that word in the same room as her.
I could feel the bond between us, low and steady, the same as always, a pull I'd stopped fighting days ago. She was my mate. That was not a thing a clerk got to call a crime.
She walked half a step ahead with her chin down and her hands bunched up in her sleeves, scared and not letting it show.
I wanted to put a hand to the back of her neck and tell her I had it.
Tell her there was a path through this and I'd already found the front half of it in Remmen's hall not an hour past.
Because there was. Remmen had a folio with my name on it and hers both, marriage and citizenship, a way to put her past the Agency's reach with a stamp if it came down to it. A way around the contracts and the clauses and the rest of the paper horseshit.
I'd tell her about it after.
Once we had Zarcal's release in hand. Once we were back at the forge, at home, because I couldn't make it mean anything smaller than that anymore, not since she'd left her little knife on my bench and her coat on my door. We'd sit down there and I’d lay the whole of it out.
But first Zarcal. Everything else after. That was the plan. I held it down and kept my hands to myself.
His place sat just off the main street, low and broad-doored like the rest. The door stood open.
Inside, he'd pulled the pantry door clean off its hinges and laid it across two stools, and he was driving a nail flush with the flat of a hammer, his back half to us.
Beside me, Chloe went stiff. I felt it more than saw it: the small hitch in her, the breath she caught and held. My hand started toward the small of her back before I'd decided to send it. Then I stopped it halfway.
After the office, I didn't know if I was allowed.
I didn't know if a hand on her in daylight, where a neighbor could see, was the exact thing that put her on the next ship out.
My hand hung there for a second, doing nothing.
Then I pulled it back. Having to ask the question at all stoked my anger hotter.
Zarcal heard us. He set the hammer down on the stool slowly and turned, and for a moment none of us knew how to stand in the room.
It was Chloe who found her feet first.
"You look better," she said. "Less pale."
"Chloe." He said her name like he was setting something down he was afraid to drop. "I'm sorry. For what I — for that night. I don't have words enough for it."
"Then don't spend them." She made it gentle. "I know it wasn't you. That was just a bad night."
His tail dropped against the floorboards. He believed her about as much as I'd have believed it in his place, which was not at all, but he let it stand.
"But since you're up and steady." She rolled on, light, already working the angle. "There's a thing you could do. For me. And for Lorkin."
I let her have it. If Zarcal was going to feel the whole weight of that night every time he looked at her, then better that the asking came from her hand than mine. A male will say no to his brother easier than he'll say it to the female he nearly put through a wall.
"Anything," Zarcal said. "Name it."
"Let me go." She kept her voice even. "Tell the Agency you release me, free and glad, and that you'd see me matched to Lorkin for the days that are left. That's all. You wouldn't even have to come to the office, we can just take a note."
For a breath, I thought he'd do it. His face had gone soft, something that might have been relief starting up under the guilt, and I let myself believe the worst of this was about to be over and we could go home.
Then it clouded.
"I'm sorry," he said. "But I can't do that."
"What?" Chloe and I said it together, in the same beat, on the same note.
He looked at her. Then he turned away from her and put it to me instead, like she'd disappeared.
"Can't you see it?" His voice had gone flat and far-off.
"It's only a matter of time until one of us kills one of them.
We're too damaged, Lorkin. The arena killed us. We just don't know we're dead yet."
"I don't think that's true," Chloe said.
She might as well not have spoken. He wasn't looking at the woman in his house anymore. He was looking at something the rest of us couldn't see: sand and blood and a hold full of dead brothers, and the anger I'd kept banked all morning cracked wide and caught.
"There is no force in this universe," I said, "that could make me hurt this female."
"I thought the same." He met my eyes, calm, certain. "And look what I nearly did to her."
If he thought we were the same, he was sorely mistaken. "I am not you."
"No?" It was a quiet accusation. "We came off the same line, brother. We were made by the same hands. You think yours wash cleaner than mine?"
I crossed the floor.
I didn't decide to. One breath I was beside Chloe and the next I was up in his face, close enough to feel the heat off him, my blunt horns a hand's width from his, and the room had gone narrow at the edges in a way I knew from a long time ago and had sworn I'd buried.
"Then we settle it the old way." The words came up out of the bottom of me. "You and me. One on one. You don't get to sit in your wrecked little house and decide she's not safe with me. You want to call me to the arena? Fine. Prove it on me, not on her."
His breath came hard and quick through his nose. Something lit in him that answered what had lit in me, the training they'd burned into us and never quite got back out.
"To the death, brother?" he said.
"No killing!" Chloe's voice cracked across the room. "Seriously, guys, no need to fight!"
We were already past her.
The floor jumped as we slammed together in the middle of his front room. My body knew the work. The footwork, the timing, the read of a male's shoulders that tells you where his fist will land before he throws it, all of it came back without my asking for it.
I caught his charge across my own shoulder and rolled him off it, a throw that looked like it would break him and didn't. He came up swinging just as fast, a wide arc that passed close enough to stir the air at my ear and was never meant to find me.
Neither of us was fighting to put the other down.
Our bodies knew a different job, the big arena moves that drew blood and noise and did no actual harm, the show we'd both been built to give. We gave it now to an empty street and the ghosts in the stands, the only crowd the pits had ever left us.
The pantry door went first, splintering across the stools. The wall after that. Then the whole front of the house, the doorframe cracking, and we spilled out into the churned mud of the street, Chloe coming after us yelling things I couldn't hear over the roar in my own skull.
There were people. I clocked them from far off and sideways, the old habit, a ring of them gathering at the edges and growing. Part of me played into it. I hated that part and couldn't reach it to make it stop.
Then there were hands on me, big ones.
Remmen had an arm locked across my chest and Kazan had the other side of me, his weight braced against mine, holding me up as much as holding me back, his low voice going steady in my ear, enough, brother, enough, she's watching, enough. It took the both of them.
Across the mud, Korfas had laid exactly one hand flat on Zarcal's shoulder, and Zarcal had stopped. Just stopped, gone loose and breathing, the fight already drained out of him.
One hand stopped Zarcal. It took two of the strongest males in New Knossos to stop me.
My eyes found Chloe a few feet off in the ring of watchers, mud to her knees, both hands over her mouth. Her gaze, when it came to mine, was wide and glassy.
I didn't know what the fear was for. I couldn't tell whether she was scared for me or scared of me, or of the thing she'd just watched come up out of her gentle blacksmith and throw a male through a wall.
Either way, the second her eyes hit mine, every promise I'd made her with my hands in the dark came back on me, I've got you, stay, I'll keep you. And underneath all of it, the beast they made, loose in the street in daylight for her to see.
I'd built her a knife so no one would ever pin her to a wall again. And here I was, the biggest thing on the street, and she had her hands over her mouth.
"Right." Remmen was breathing hard himself, one eye already darkening where somebody's elbow had caught him in the pulling apart.
He didn't let go of me. "Korfas, put them in the cells.
Separately. Let them cool overnight and we'll settle this like civilized beasts in the morning, when there's less of the town to enjoy it. "
Nobody argued. Kazan's grip on me didn't ease.
"The female should come to the Agency barracks." Theeodus had appeared at the edge, pale and wringing, his jumpsuit splashed to the knee with mud. "For her own safety. Until all of this is resolved properly. There's a room."
"She's welcome at the orchard." Kazan said it over the top of him, flat, not a question. "With me and Maisie. As long as she likes, until it's sorted."
Theeodus opened his mouth. Looked at Kazan. Shut it.
"The orchard," Chloe said. Her voice came out steadier than her eyes. "I'll go to the orchard."
She turned toward Kazan with the mud on her, and her arms wrapped around herself. Then Remmen got me moving the other way down the street toward the jail, his hand fisted in the back of my shirt, the crowd peeling open to let the monster through.