Chapter 13
CHLOE
I'd been on Maisie's porch for three hours, and I still wanted to throw something.
Preferably at a minotaur. More specifically, one sitting in a cell on the other side of town for the crime of being the single biggest idiot on this or any planet.
"I cannot believe him." I'd said some version of it maybe nine times by then. Maisie kept topping up my cup and letting me. "He just did that. In the daylight. In the middle of the street. To just throw down, like a—"
"Like a veteran of the arena?" Maisie didn't look up.
I jabbed my cup at her. "They both ignored me and decided to run at each other like wild animals!"
"They're bulls. They do that from time to time.
" She had her feet tucked under her in the big chair, cider balanced on one knee, looking insultingly peaceful about the entire thing.
"And they spent most of their lives in the arena.
They're still learning how to settle things… peacefully." A pause. "Are they hurt?"
"I don't think so."
"Good."
That was it. Good. Like one man putting another man through a wall was a weather report. I loved her. I also wanted to push her off her own porch.
The star-figs had gone sparkly in the dusk, whole rows of them glowing soft, and one of the goats had its head through the fence rail watching me like even it thought I was being a lot.
Everything here was so calm. Maisie got the orchard and the glowing fruit and the giant who'd built her a buggy with her name on it, and I'd gotten a blacksmith who answered the world with his hands.
That wasn't even true. I didn't have the blacksmith. All I had was a one-way ticket back to Earth.
"How do you handle it?" My voice came out thinner than I wanted, and I hated it. "Maybe I should just hop on the transport when it shows up and be glad of it."
Maisie let the quiet sit for a beat. "You don't mean that."
"I think I do." I looked into my cup instead of at her. "You didn't see it, Maze."
I didn't say the rest. That I'd stood in that mud with both hands over my mouth and watched the gentlest thing I'd ever had turn into something I didn't know.
That every man before him had, sooner or later, shown me the part of himself that handed me back, and Lorkin had gone and done his in front of the whole town.
That it would be easier to climb onto the ship myself than stand on a dock and watch him put me on it.
I'm normally hilarious about this kind of thing. I make it a bit, but with Lorkin, I couldn't.
Maisie was quiet. Then she set her cup down on the rail.
"It isn't like the brochures," she said.
I looked over at her. "What isn't?"
"Belonging here." She picked at the hem of her sleeve, the way she does when she's deciding whether to say a true thing. "There's no way to put it that doesn't sound completely unhinged. Drink your cider first."
"Maisie." I nudged her foot with mine.
"Kazan says he knew before he saw my face." She said it to the porch rail, not to me. "Off the transport. One breath of me across the whole bay and that was it, done, decided. He's described it about forty times and it always comes out like I'm a pie he smelled cooling on a sill."
"Deeply romantic." I snorted.
"Right? Every girl's dream, to be the pie.
" But she was smiling at her knees. "It's a real thing, Chloe.
Not an arrangement. Not the contract. There's a...
I don't have a good word. A pull. He says it sits in his chest and pulls toward wherever I am.
When he gets that look like he's listening to something nobody else can hear, that's it.
That's me, apparently. Ringing in him like a struck bell. "
The cider had gone warm in my hands. I made myself keep my voice light. "And you? Do you get the pull?"
She took her time. "Not like he does. Quieter.
I didn't know what it was at first." She turned her cup slowly in her hands.
"The whole time. I just didn't have a word for it, so I called it everything else.
Nerves. Bad cider. The fact that I'd crossed the galaxy to marry a stranger the size of a barn.
" She finally looked at me. "It got louder the more I stopped fighting it.
And then one night it wasn't quiet at all.
Everything, all at once, this thing rooting down through the middle of me and grabbing hold and not letting go.
He says I'm his mate. It means something. "
Something in the center of me went very still.
Rooting down through the middle. Grabbing hold. Not letting go.
I knew that. I'd been carrying since the first day in that little agency office and had blamed on heartburn, of all the stupid things.
And the loud one, three days into the best and most doomed week of my life, on a cleared workbench with my hands locked around his horns, and him buried so deep I felt it in my teeth, when something reached out of me and took hold of something in him and set, fast and final and impossible to take back.
I'd been so scared of how badly I wanted it to be real that I'd talked myself out of it before I came down off the bench.
"Chloe." Maisie was watching my face. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere." I cleared my throat. Performed. It's what I do. "So. The horns."
She blinked. "The—"
I leaned in, elbows on my knees. "You grab the horns, right? At the, the bloom-y moment. Tell me you grab the horns."
A slow grin spread across her face. "Oh, you absolute menace. You've been gripping the blacksmith's horns."
I pointed at her. "I asked you a question."
"The bases," she said, and took a serene sip, "are extremely sensitive. It's not my fault Earth men were built like discount furniture."
I sat back, fully restored. "I want it on the record that I have, on multiple occasions, reduced seven feet of war criminal to a whimper using only my hands and a good attitude."
I laughed, and then it cracked in the middle and came out wet, and Maisie's face went soft, and she reached over and took my hand and didn't say anything about it.
She'd just given me a name for the thing in my chest, and I had no idea what to do with it.
I didn't sleep.
The orchard bed was soft, and the quilt smelled of fig sap, and somebody had left a light going low. I lay in it and turned the whole horrible day over and over until it wore smooth.
He'd brawled in the street like an animal.
True. He'd let the worst of himself off its leash where I could see it.
Also true. I'd looked at him in that mud and felt something drop straight through the floor of me, scared down to the bone, and I still hadn't been able to tell whether I was scared of him or scared for him.
Somewhere around the third turn of it I worked out the answer, and it was so stupid and so simple that I laughed at the ceiling.
For him. Duh.
I'd been scared for him the whole time. The fear of him I'd been so sure I ought to feel had never once shown up, not that first night, the forge, or the street with another male's blood on his knuckles. I kept waiting for the trap to spring, and it just never did.
By the time the window went gray, I'd stopped arguing with myself.
He was an idiot, the biggest idiot on the planet, and he was mine.
I was as sure of that as I'd ever been of anything.
Surer, even. The pull in the middle of me pointed east toward a man in a cell, and I was done.
Done running. I'd run my whole life, off Earth, across two failed husbands, right up to the edge of this.
I wasn't going to climb onto a ship now and leave the one thing I'd ever felt root down and hold.
Maisie drove us into town. She took her buggy fast and easy over the ridge road's bad spots without slowing, and she didn't ask me once if I was sure, which I appreciated, because I'd have had to lie.
The courthouse stood at the head of the main street, all dark timber and stone footings, the enormous doors thrown open.
Inside, it smelled of cold, old wood. There was a dais, a clerk's table, a handful of townsfolk scattered on the benches to watch the show, and down at the front, looking absurd at human scale, two enormous bruised minotaurs.
Lorkin had one eye swollen, a split at his brow, his hands folded in front of him. Zarcal beside him, gray and quiet, staring at the floor. Neither of them saw me come in.
The judge was a wiry older minotaur with reading glasses perched on a broad nose, and he was already mid-sentence, and I caught the end of it walking up the aisle.
"—damages to the structure, disturbance of the peace, and a public brawl with injury.
The fine I can set today." He shuffled his papers.
"The rest is the Agency's to weigh. Given the nature of the offense, I'm advising a suspension of both males' standing with the Matchmaking Authority. One year, no placements, no contracts."
Had I heard that right?
One year. No contracts.
It came to me all at once, the whole ugly shape of it. Lorkin could pay a fine. Lorkin could pay ten fines. But a male barred from the Agency for a year couldn't take my placement off Zarcal, couldn't sign the one piece of paper that would keep me on this planet.
Well. Fuck.
I was on my feet before I thought about it.
"He's my mate!"
It came out of me too loud, the way everything does, ringing off the timber and the stone, and the whole room turned to look at the human woman who'd stood up in the third row with no plan, no permission, and a heartbeat you could probably hear from the gallery.
Behind me the big doors opened, but I refused to look at who had come in; it didn't matter.
"He's my mate," I said again, because the first one had been mostly adrenaline. "Lorkin. The big one with the terrible judgment. You can't bar him from me. I'm… we're…" I'd never said the word out loud in my life, and it scraped on the way up. "He's mine. I'm claiming him. The Agency can stuff it."
I wasn't certain. Not all the way. I was a woman who'd felt a thing on a workbench and had a thing explained to her on a porch, and now I was betting my entire life on the two of them being one and the same. It was a leap off a roof in the dark. But it got the room's attention.
Lorkin had come up out of his slump like I'd hauled him by a wire, his whole battered face turned up to me, and he wasn't careful anymore, wasn't unreadable, none of the things he'd been in the office.
"If the male is mated," said a dry, unbothered voice I'd have known anywhere, "that bond supersedes all contracts."
It was Nezara. Theeodus was scurrying in her wake with an armful of files. She crossed the room with the calm of a woman who'd handled every species of raging bull and one human bride before lunch.
She didn't look surprised. She looked interested.
"It supersedes any placement," she went on to the judge, like she was correcting a clerical error. "Bonds like this predate the Agency. We don't break bonds. We can't. The contract is void on its face." A glance at me, gold eyes steady. "If it's real."
"It's real." Lorkin's voice came out wrecked and low, and rolled clear to the back of the room. He was still looking right at me. "She's my mate."
The room came apart at the seams. Somebody in the gallery said something, somebody else said something back, Theeodus dropped a file, and the judge brought his gavel down hard enough to crack the air.
"Order. There is still the matter of a fine," he said over the noise, banging again. "Regardless of anyone's domestic arrangements."
I didn't hear the rest. I was already moving.
Down the row, banging my shin on the bench, past Theeodus and his scattered papers and Nezara's almost-smile, down to the front of the room where the biggest idiot on the planet had turned to catch me, because of course he had, he always had, and I hit his chest at a dead run and he took my whole weight and folded all the way around me, both arms, his face down in my hair, shaking.
"You came," he said into my hair, like he didn't quite believe it.
"Obviously." It came out thick and wrecked. I got two fists in his torn shirt and held on. Behind me the gavel kept cracking and the whole room kept talking, and I pressed my face into all that warm, soot-smelling idiot, and stayed.