Chapter 7
Istand before the study with my hand against the broad heartwood door.
I look back along the corridor towards the kitchen and dining room beyond.
I cannot see the cage from here, but the urge to go back and drag it into my bedroom is almost overpowering.
There, I could keep an eye on her. There I could breathe in her scent, taste that little thread of lust under her fear...
I force the urge down and open the door. It whispers open into the study.
Both of my battle-brothers are already seated, deep in thought. Arrek’s aura is filled with the thrill of the hunt and capture, while Mero’s is more troubled, his attention turned inward.
Two large, handmade bookcases occupy two walls. Neither is more than half full. The ancient volumes on Orb-Shifting occupy a shelf of their own, including first editions I spent far too much acquiring.
A writing desk stands in one corner, hand-drawn military maps from ancient battles spread across its surface. A globe sits among them, its three-dimensional display centred upon the Ziran system, once under our domain and now within Wild Space.
Three immense, comfortable leather chairs surround a low table in the nook beside the city-facing window. Our bar cart stands in the corner.
Candlelight reflects against the glass, making the capital beyond slightly harder to see. The completed wedding spire still catches the moonlight, platinum vines circling the marble as it rises from the snowcapped peak north of the city.
It sits wrong against the older capital, jutting without the unified lines of the architecture around it. Queen Jasmine and her triad conceived it as a needle in Obsidian’s eye, intended to demoralize his troops with a display of our excesses.
They fundamentally misunderstood what drove Obsidian’s men. The Fanatics took pride in their leanness. They took pride in their deprivation. They believed themselves engaged in a holy war, and only those willing to die for it had followed Obsidian.
That, and the brutes who simply wanted to own women, who cared nothing for money or things, only for the thrill of totally controlling human women.
A sick wave of recognition moves through me. I have waged war against men like that, yet the distance between their hunger for control and what stirred inside me when Nell was forced to obey me no longer feels like a chasm. I turn away from the window before the thought can fully form.
Through our Bond, I feel Arrek replaying the chase.
“She made a smooth move getting me into that windbreak,” he says. “It was too tight for me. My eyes must have passed right over her in the river, and then she fooled me with that sandal trick.”
Mero takes a slow drink of whisky.
I close the study door and walk to the remaining chair, but I do not sit. I place both hands upon its back.
“We need to talk about why hunting her down felt like the most important thing in the world.”
Mero studies me through the warrior Bond, slowly spinning the crystal whisky glass between his fingers.
He already knows what I mean. I can feel in his aura that he intends to evade it, that he does not want to examine the possibility, as though the old superstitions might prove correct merely because we speak of them.
“She is growing thinner,” Mero says. “Her footsteps are lighter every day.”
He leans forward, resting his forearms upon his thighs.
“We have found twenty-two of her stores on our land. Food. Blankets. Clothing. Medicinal supplies. Enough to carry her through ten winters, and we keep finding more.”
Mero’s eyes narrow. For an instant, he is less present.
I know where he has gone because the same memory rises in me. Gaunt faces. Bones pressing against skin stretched too thin. Having to dole out thin broth even as the people of Ziran II begged for more, because feeding them too quickly could have killed them.
I force the memory down.
“Do you believe she has nothing more wherever she lives? Even what she has hidden upon our land could carry her through ten winters. Yet she keeps rationing herself thinner. She has survived alone for so long that she cannot trust the future. Even when she is not in danger, her mind cannot accept that she is safe.”
Mero looks into the whisky turning within his glass.
“We keep her here for a year. We feed her. Fatten her. Show her what it is to be cared for.”
“And then what?” I ask. “We let her go? She wants to be free.”
“She’ll want to stay when we’re done with her,” Arrek growls, and there is a hot thread of need in his aura. He has no shame in it, no hidden quarrel. “I already have her eating from my hand. Soon she’ll be mewling at my feet.”
“We came here for peace,” I say. “Not this.”
“We had peace for a short while,” Mero replies. “Then we smelled her scent.”
“Then why did that scent shatter our peace? Let’s not hide from what this is, or why she has been all we can think about since the first day we smelled her.”
“Do not speak it,” Mero says. “It is bad luck.”
“Speaking it will not change anything. Either she is our Mate or she is not.” I look from him to Arrek. “If she is not, will either of you want her any less? Will you still care for her after we take her?”
“You know the answer to that,” Mero says. “So why are you asking?”
Mero reaches for another crystal glass and pours me a measure of whisky. I finally release the chair and sit, accepting the glass from him.
“I controlled myself in the forest,” I say. “But it took everything I had not to pin her down and fuck her until neither of us could think. Every time I breathe in her scent, it is torture.”
Neither man looks surprised.
“But that is not what troubles me.”
I remember her wriggling from foot to foot while she tried not to tell me what she needed. The little bell ringing because she had no other choice. The collar she fastened around her own throat before I would open the cage.
I enjoyed it.
I stood outside the washroom imagining water running over her naked body, fighting to regain control as her scent slowly faded. Then she pressed her neck against my finger, and one touch shattered the mirage of my control.
“I want to own her.”
“It is only natural to want to possess such a beauty,” Mero says. “But that cannot be all of it.”
I raise the whisky to my lips, then pause without drinking.
“I want to make her want things she does not want. Crave things that would make her burn with shame. The cage. The collar. My commands. I want her to guard her freedom as fiercely as she does now, and yet place it in my hands. I want her to know she can leave and beg me not to let her.”
Neither of them responds at once.
“And there is no possible chance we allow the Commissioner to take her to the capital tomorrow.”
“She will choose the contract,” Mero says. “The alternative would consume years of her human life.”
“She is a survivor. If she is Bonded to us, then the more deeply we are in her mind, the further she will retreat. She will know that when this is done, she can take the thousands of years of life the Bond gives her and go. Put on a black ring and never feel us again.”
“I smelled her scent,” Arrek says. “She’s already craving us. Don’t fear, my battle-brother. Before long, she’ll be crawling to us with her mouth open and her tongue out.”
I shake my head. “You underestimate her again. You promised you would catch her the first day we smelled her. Then within the first week. Month after month, she has led you around by your cock.”
I am one of two men on Colossus who can speak to him this way without blades being drawn, without a challenge issued.
We dealt enough death in the arenas. Foolish boasts.
Petty insults. But you cannot back down, or you are forever weak.
When the Civil War came, all who followed us against the Branded of our own species knew we had faced down Aurelians in triad-against-triad close combat.
We had felt Orb-Blades against our own, and not just in training.
I remember when we were rising through the ranks, serving beneath different Generals. You could always tell which leaders wished they could be on the front lines and which preferred to remain high above them.
Arrek only chuckles and grins ruefully.
For a time, none of us speaks. Mero finishes his whisky and sets the crystal glass upon the low table. Then he rises and crosses to the writing desk.
He lifts a folded document from beneath the hand-drawn maps and brings it back to us. Formal Aurelian script fills the pages, written in Mero’s fine, precise hand.
I read it once. Then again.
“She will never agree to this.”
Mero holds my gaze.
“She will.”