28. Silar
28
SILAR
I t did not take long to secure the property and close the gate that had been left open. I found the dead man’s ship with ease, and there was only one set of tracks from the vessel. The only places with two fresh sets of tracks came from where he’d held my Cherry.
Killing rage uncoiled inside me. Murdering that man was not enough to quench it. Even now the hatred built and built. Every time I thought I had it conquered, I remembered his hand on Cherry’s arm, his weapon aimed at her head. I remembered the fear in her eyes.
But there were no other men to destroy to soothe that rage. Doing everything I could to quell the writhing, murderous need inside me, I brought Tarion back to the shuldu stalls and stalked back to the house.
The door was locked and I had not brought the key. A mirthless ghost of a smile tugged at my lips. My stubborn little wife had actually listened to me.
“Cherry,” I called through the door, speaking loudly, being mindful of her bad hearing. “It’s me.”
A small cry, rapid footsteps, and then the door was yanked open. Cherry stared at me, one hand on the doorknob, the other wrapped around the handle of her heavy dark pan. When she saw my eye snag on the pan, she lifted a shoulder and simply said, “Well, it worked once before.”
“Worked once before?” I asked as I stepped inside the kitchen.
“Yes. On him , in fact.” She brought it up high, like a shield over her chest. “Is there anyone else?”
“No. He came alone.”
She visibly sagged. I would have caught her up in my arms to support her, but when I raised my hands I saw just how filthy with blood they were. This was the first time I’d ever seen human blood, I realized. It reminded me of the colour of my wife’s scarf. Cherry red.
I could not touch her now.
Even once I washed my hands, they would never be clean.
So I said, “You should sit,” instead of reaching for her. But Cherry’s compliance seemed to have begun and ended with my command to go inside the house. Because she didn’t sit. She started pacing the room, clutching the pan so hard that if her hands had been any larger or stronger the thing might have been in danger of cracking.
“I’m so sorry, Silar. I should have told you before. I wasn’t… I wasn’t honest about what drove me here. I was in debt and I was on the run and… Let’s just say that wasn’t my first encounter with that asshole.”
She stopped her pacing, looking stricken.
“But I never thought he’d have the resources to follow me all the way out here. To Elora Station, sure. But not here. He must have had some seriously high-up contacts on the stations. Maybe he got access to the shipping logs if it was recorded that I left on that shuttle.”
She shivered, then put her pan down on the table.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I can’t believe I’ve dragged you into this mess. And now you’ve had to kill someone because of me and I-”
“He is not the first man I’ve killed.”
She froze, then slowly dragged her gaze up to mine.
“He’s just the first one I’ve killed here.”
“W…What?”
“This is a penal colony, Cherry. I am a convicted murderer.”
There was no sense in not telling her now. She’d seen me kill that man. I could think of no reason to conceal my past from her any longer.
My wife deserved to know who I was, and I began to hate myself for taking this long to tell her. I had been too selfish. Too caught up in the idea of keeping her when I never could have hoped to deserve her.
I grasped my data tab from my trouser pocket and held it in the air between us.
“Call the warden,” I told her flatly, not letting myself give into the pain of what would happen next. “Tell him what I’ve done.”
She took the data tab with a white and shaking hand.
“Mine’s dead,” she whispered. “I would have called him before, when you were out there…” Her throat worked as she stared at the blank, cracked face of my data tab’s screen. “What’s going to happen? Will you… Will you be in trouble? It was self defense, right?”
“That is not a legally acceptable defense for most castes in Zabrian culture,” I bit out. “I was trying to protect my mother from an intruder in our home on Zabria as a child and yet I was still convicted.”
Not that it had even done my mother any good. She was already dead by the time my tail had unloosed from that man’s throat.
Tasting ash and blood at the memory, I focused on Cherry and continued. “Now that I am an adult, my story will be even less sympathetic.”
“But you were saving me!” she insisted. “Your wife! Not to mention I’m, like, a foreign national, right? There would have been a huge scandal if I’d gotten killed here!”
“All of that is correct,” I admitted. “And none of that changes the fact that I could have simply incapacitated that human male and brought him to the warden. That is what I legally should have done. Technically, I did not need to kill him. But when I saw him with his hands on you…”
Now I was the one who paced the room, fury spiking motion into my limbs.
“There is a part of me that is broken, Cherry,” I said in a hateful, hollow voice. “And it shattered entirely when I thought that he might take you from me. My control was gone and I had to kill him. Even knowing what it would cost me.”
“What will it cost you?”
Everything. Absolutely everything.
I came to a stop in front of the oven. Staring into the glow of the coals, I started making plans. Plans to keep my wife safe and comfortable after I was gone. The words burned me like I’d reached right into the fire but I said them anyway. “You may be permitted to stay here if you agree to marry another man.”
“Absolutely not!” she retorted.
“I will not be allowed to remain here,” I went on as if she had not spoken. “I will likely be sent back to the Empire, to labour in the mines until my death.”
“No!”
“Call the warden, Cherry. What’s done is done.”
“Fuck the warden!” she cried. “Fuck that and just fuck all of this!”
“This is my second offense. I-”
“I don’t care! Whatever happened in your past, you’re still my husband. I’m still your wife. Do you hear me, Silar? It’s you and me. Together. Forever. That’s it. End. Of. Discussion!”
Apparently this was not the end of the discussion, because without even so much as stopping to take a breath she then furiously asked, “Do you have a shovel?”
The unexpectedness of her question finally made me turn to look at her once more.
She no longer seemed pale and shaken, but fiercely determined, two spots of colour burning high in her cheeks, her eyes agleam.
“Why?” I asked.
“Goddamnit, we do not have time for your millions of fucking whys right now!” She stamped her little foot. “Do you have a shovel, Silar? Yes, or no?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She sighed, then began speaking so rapidly I feared my translator would not keep up. “We’ll dig a grave. You’ve got tons of land. We’ll bury him in some random-ass forgotten corner and no one will ever know.”
I stared at her, astonished that she would do such a thing when my own father had once turned me in. My sweet, beautiful Cherry, was offering to drag the filth of that man’s corpse away from here, to help me hide it, all to protect me. She’d watched me kill him. She’d seen the blood on my hands and yet was still offering her own to me.
A thread of hope wound through me. Hope that, even though I’d killed not just one man, but two men, I’d still somehow get to keep her.
But no. Of course not.
“His ship.”
“Shit!” She paused to think, appearing to barely rein in panic. “OK. His ship can’t be that big. Maybe we could get the shuldu to drag it. Maybe even hook up some bulls, too, if the shuldu aren’t enough. Get it into the treeline, just so it’s covered and out of sight. Then we’ll decide what to do. We don’t need to tell the warden-”
The kitchen door swung open behind us and a deep voice boomed through the air.
“You don’t need to tell me what? ”