1. Anne
ANNE
I didn’t make it three freaking minutes on my new planet before I was wearing somebody else’s blood. It had to be some kind of record, and not one I was in a hurry to beat.
“Get me something clean. Now,” I said in the voice that got people moving, the one I’d learned on the mining colony. The budget there was a joke, so everyone did three jobs whether they’d trained for them or not.
It worked here too. A hand the size of a dinner plate pushed a folded shirt into mine. I wadded it against the mess of Giles’s forearm and leaned my weight in.
He groaned.
“Stay with me. You do not get to die on the welcome mat.” I found the pulse in his wrist. Quick, but there. “Think how it looks. First one off the ship and already flat on your back.”
“I aim,” he got out, “to manage expectations.”
“You’ve smashed them.” The bleeding was slowing under my hands.
We’d crossed the whole dark stretch between Earth and here on the same transport and traded maybe ten words, most of them me saying I was fine, I’d sit in the back, thanks.
Keeping to myself was the one thing I never lost the knack for, and now here I was with both hands red with his blood.
Around us the dock was all legs. Minotaurs, dozens of them, tall as door frames and wider, close enough that a sensible woman would have been afraid.
I wasn’t. I’d read the file on the way out.
Freed gladiators, every one of them, bred and sold to kill in front of crowds, then somehow loose and out here building a town with their hands.
A whole settlement of men carrying more than any ward I’d ever worked, and three of us shipped in to do something about it.
I’d wanted the work. I still did. I just hadn’t pictured day one on my knees in fruit pulp with my elbow in a coworker’s arm.
A shadow dropped over us and stayed. I looked up, and up. A minotaur was folding himself onto his heels beside me, a beat-up canvas bag in one fist. Crouched, he still had a head on me.
“Otho.” He was already reaching for Giles. “You keep him breathing?”
“He did the hard part. I just held the edges together.”
He pressed two fingers along the bone. Giles hissed. Otho nodded like the hiss had told him something useful. “Clean break. Good pressure.” His eyes went to my hands. “You a doctor?”
I didn’t let myself react. That question always found the sore spot and put its thumb on it.
“Counselor,” I said, fast, out ahead of it. “First aid is just a bonus.”
The doctor part I’d wanted, once, back when I still let myself want things. It cost money I never had and years I couldn’t spare, and counselor was what I could afford to become instead. I’d made my peace with that a long time ago. Mostly.
Otho grunted, which I chose to read as a pass, and had a brace on Giles’s arm in four seconds flat. Then he turned and barked two names into the crowd. Two of the big ones came and scooped Giles up like a sack of meal.
“My office. Careful. He’s held together with good intentions and a bit of cotton.”
Giles managed to lift two fingers at me as he went bobbing off over a shoulder. Then it was just me, kneeling in a puddle of squashed purple fruit with a stranger’s blood going tacky on my knuckles.
I wiped my hands down my trousers. It didn’t help. Nothing much had, for about two years now.
I refused to think about the invitation at the bottom of my bag. Cream card, gold edge, my name in good calligraphy. Alistair and Janice request the pleasure…
I’d buried it under my spare socks the morning I left and still hadn’t put it out an airlock. A practical woman would have. I guess I was just mostly practical.
A cloth came into my line of sight. Folded, damp, clean. The hand offering it could have cupped my whole skull.
I took it on reflex and followed the hand up its arm, to the face at the top.
He was the one who’d parted that whole crowd earlier without seeming to try, every giant on the dock giving way before he reached them.
He wore a long coat made of good cloth that was actually pressed. His horns were capped in worked silver that threw the light around. He had a face that gave up nothing at all.
“Remmen,” he said. One word, low.
The mayor. That name had been spelled out on the paperwork.
“Anne.” I gestured at the fruit-and-blood catastrophe between us. “Sorry about the, uh. Everything.”
He just looked at me, and it wasn’t a polite once-over. It was slower and lower than that, and it landed somewhere south of my stomach and settled in, warm and unwelcome. Heat climbed the back of my neck.
My pulse had finally come down after the emergency. Now it took off again, with no emergency to blame it on.
I was done with this. All of it. Boxed it up and left it on Earth with the good plates and the worse decisions, because wanting things had never once worked out in my favor. Whatever was climbing my throat now hadn’t asked my permission, and it wasn’t getting it.
The minotaur woman running the dock finally got back to me.
She’d been working the ramp through the whole disaster, ticking names off a paper, shorter than the men and moving like she was running behind schedule.
Somewhere in the thick of it she’d already shouted something at me about saving her a counselor.
Now she took me in properly, blood and all, without a blink.
“I’m Nezara, the head of the Agency here in New Knossos. Thanks for the help.”
“Glad to be useful.” I meant it more than I wanted to.
“You’ll fit right in.” She clapped her folder shut. “Come on, then. Let’s clear off and let these gentlemen go and meet their brides in peace. Nothing spoils a first hello like blood.”
The brides. Right. A dozen women were coming down the ramp in a nervous cluster, here to marry monsters they’d never laid eyes on, and every unpaired giant on the dock stood up a little straighter.
Not my circus.
As far as the bulls went, I was off limits and I was happy about it. There’d been some lawyerly language in the stack of paperwork I’d signed before boarding about fraternization and romantic entanglements that basically boiled down to: look but don’t touch.
Fine by me.
And the mayor was certainly looking his fill.
He hadn’t stopped since I’d looked up from Giles.
No glance and away, none of the polite sliding-off you’d give a woman kneeling in someone else’s blood.
He looked at me like he had all day and meant to spend every minute of it on me, slow, down and back up, not one bit sorry about it.
If eyes could caress a person, he’d have had me shivering by now.
They could. He was.
And I looked right back, because up close he was enormous, and I couldn’t stop myself noticing it.
Those hands could span my whole waist and lap over.
One of them had passed me a cloth a minute ago that all but disappeared in his palm.
And I could guess, on no evidence at all, exactly how those hands would feel closing over my hips and lifting me clean off the ground. Setting me down wherever he wanted me.
The crate at my back was a foot away. Half a step and he’d have me against it, all that size crowding in until there was nowhere left to go, nothing but shoulders and heat and the smell of him. It should have scared me. It pressed my thighs together on the cold dock and thinned my breath instead.
I wanted that broad hand spread flat between my shoulder blades, holding me still against all that chest while I found out what he tasted like.
I’d made a practice of wanting nothing I couldn’t have. He’d undone it in no time, and all he’d said was his name.
Look but don’t touch. On paper it had been the easiest promise I ever signed. Three feet from all that, it read like a dare.
Then he made himself stop. He stepped back and gave me a small, correct nod, the kind you give a stranger you’re finished with.
“Counselor.” He said it like a man shutting a door. Then he turned and went, back into the crowd toward the ramp and the brides and whatever else was his to carry, and took every degree of that heat with him.
The dock felt colder the second he was gone. Which was fine. Ideal, even.
Nezara peeled me off the dock and pointed me at the town, and Chelsea caught up before we’d cleared the bay, looking about as steady as I felt.
We’d shared a transport and a grand total of maybe four sentences, most of them mine, none of them worth keeping. But there’s nothing like watching a man nearly bleed out on the welcome mat to hurry a friendship along.
“Is Giles going to be okay?” she asked.
“He’ll be dining out on that scar for a year.”
She let out a breath that was half a laugh. I decided Chelsea and I were going to get along.
The town was a strange little place. Half of it old dark timber, low and wide, built for bodies twice my size.
The other half gray prefab, dropped in among the wood and not matching a thing.
A forge smoked at one end. A market was going up at the other.
A place still arguing with itself about what it wanted to be when it grew up.
I could relate.
The office was one of the prefab boxes, and my apartment was the box set on top of it.
Small. Clean enough. A bed, a table, a chair, a window.
Chelsea had the door next to mine, Giles would have the one past that once Otho turned him loose.
My whole new world, it turned out, would fit on one short walkway.
“Settle in,” Nezara said, already going. “Someone will turn up in the morning with a schedule and more forms. There are always more forms.” And she was gone, on to the next line on her agenda.
My bags would be delivered later, but at least I didn’t need to unpack just yet. I went to the little window and looked down at my new street, because it beat flopping down onto the bed and reconsidering all of my life choices.
Half the town was down in that street, but I found him in a heartbeat. The tallest one on the road, unhurried, the good coat catching the last of the light. Walking away like the dock hadn’t happened at all.
Then he stopped and looked up. Straight at me.
I jerked back from the glass hard enough to knock the table, heart going, face hot, as if the look had reached all the way up here and burned me.