2. Anne
ANNE
I stared at the giant chair opposite my desk like I could will a mentally fragile minotaur into it by sheer manifestation.
Apparently my powers didn’t work in New Knossos. And they hadn’t been working for more than a week. When I’d taken the job, it had come with a certain promise of people to help. Instead, I stared at dust motes.
“No takers?” Chelsea leaned against the doorframe and pursed her lips.
“Like you’re doing any better.” I didn’t glare. She hadn’t earned that and I could be a big girl. But sitting around all day waiting for the bulls to come to me was making my teeth ache.
“I had one.” Chelsea came in and folded herself into the client chair, which swallowed her the way it would’ve swallowed me.
Her feet didn’t touch the floor. Neither would mine.
Everything in this town was built for a body twice our size, and the furniture in my own office made me feel like a kid sent to the principal.
“Sort of. He stood in the doorway, looked at the couch, and left.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He said the roof was crooked.” She considered it. “Looks fine to me.”
I laughed, and it came out uglier than I meant it to.
Chelsea wasn’t wrong to be patient. But it was still hard to sit still.
She was going by the official procedure book, which had been drilled into our skulls during our off-planet orientation, and the procedure book said exactly this: Give them time.
Let them come. Don’t push a traumatized population, don’t chase, don’t make the office a place a man felt cornered. Build safety. Wait.
It was good advice. That advice had also never sat in an empty room for eight days while an entire town of men who woke up screaming decided they’d rather tough it out.
“One of them reached out,” I said.
Chelsea’s eyebrows went up. “Who—”
“Not to me. Not to you. To Giles.” Who was, currently, the only one of the three of us anybody had voluntarily approached, and Giles had a broken arm and a bedside manner like a wet towel.
“And Giles says the guy’ll probably bolt if he has to actually talk.
Especially to a woman.” I turned my pen over on the desk.
“I’m not sure New Knossos will need all three of us. ”
“They might come around.”
“How much trauma training do you have?”
“Anne,” she said gently, and I held back a sneer. Chelsea had that caring, therapisty way of speaking that got right under my skin. I faced my clients with a bit more bite. “It’s been eight days. Pilot programs take time. Nezara knows that. The Agency knows that. Nobody’s grading us.”
Nobody’s grading us yet.
She meant it kindly. It landed like a stone.
Chelsea had a stack of references and a career to walk back to.
Me, on the other hand? If the men here were desperate, then I was their twin.
There was nothing for me back on Earth and the Alien Matchmaking Agency had taken a chance on my less-than-stellar references.
This had to work.
“Early days yet,” I agreed.
Chelsea nodded like I’d said something wise.
She went back to her office, which was as empty as mine, to be patient in it.
I sat there another minute. Two. A dust mote found a bar of light and rode it down, unhurried like it belonged. I didn’t.
Then I stood up fast enough that the chair barked against the floor.
I knew exactly the woman I’d turn into if I let the room win. Patient. Useless. Defeated and fired.
Screw that.
If they wouldn’t come to me, I’d go to them and ask where it hurt.
Otho’s practice was the one building in town that always had somebody in it, which told you everything.
It sat off the market end of the street, and I could smell it from ten feet out, that clean bite of antiseptic under something herbal I didn’t have a name for.
Inside, a bull the size of a doorway sat on a bench holding his own hand like it had personally betrayed him.
Another had a strapped ankle up on a stool.
Otho moved between them without hurry and without stopping, and there was a gray cast to him, around the eyes, that I recognized.
I’d worn it. It was the look of someone who wasn’t allowed to be tired.
I bet Remmen knew the look too.
Don’t think about the mayor.
He clocked me the second I came in and didn’t stop what he was doing.
“Counselor.”
“You can call me Anne.”
“If you’re hurt, sit. If you’re not, I’m busy.”
“You’re always busy.” The bull with the betrayed hand was trying to hold a pad to a split knuckle and pull his own wrap tight with fingers and teeth, making a mess of it.
I crossed over, took the loose end, and set my thumb where the pressure needed to be.
“Keep still,” I told him, and he did, blinking down at me.
To Otho: “That’s actually what I came about. ”
Otho watched me work for a second, then went back to the ankle. “You want to mend split knuckles?”
“I came about you having four jobs and two hands.” I tied the wrap off clean and tucked the end.
The bull flexed his fingers, grunted what might have been thanks, and took himself off.
“This town’s got one healer for hundreds of men, and half of what walks through your door isn’t the thing that’s actually wrong with them. You know that better than I do.”
He finally looked at me straight. Up close the tiredness was worse, and my hands itched to take something off him.
“I’m not interested in talking around the point,” he said.
“You see all of them. Sooner or later, everybody in this town ends up in front of you.” I kept it plain.
“I’m asking if there’s anyone you’re worried about.
Not the arms and the ankles.” I wanted to say more, but doing so when I could still feel the impression of the bull’s wrap seemed a bit imprudent.
Look at me, being all professional.
“No.”
“Otho.”
“I mean it kindly, counselor.” He picked up a cloth and started wiping down the bench, giving his hands a job so they wouldn’t have to be still.
“You’ve got good hands. I saw them on the dock.
If a man’s bleeding, I’d hand him to you tomorrow.
” He set the cloth down. “But I won’t force any of them to split their heads open to make them more palatable to a human bride. ”
“That’s not—”
“It’s exactly that. They know what you are.
They can smell the Agency on you.” He said it flat, no insult in it.
“These men were bought and sold, handled their whole lives, and now they’re free.
” He shook his head. “Some of them won’t touch the Agency with horns or hooves.
And if they start to distrust me? A man can survive hurt feelings; I won’t let one of them bleed out because they don’t trust me. ”
I stood there and took it. He was right.
“I’ve been told it’s a bit more serious than hurt feelings.”
“That’s not mine to solve.” But he said it without heat. “Good day, counselor.”
I left before I made it worse.
I was still chewing on Otho’s words with my head down when I walked straight into a warm wall of muscle and mayor.
I knew whose it was before I looked up, which was humiliating enough on its own. Heat flashed through me, the same full-body flush I’d had on the dock, dropping low and stupid and unasked-for, and I hadn’t given it permission then either.
“Mayor.”
“Please, call me Remmen.” He steadied me with one hand at my shoulder and took it back the instant I had my feet, like my skin was slimy or possibly diseased.
Even that half-second of it went through me.
He was in his fancy coat again, horns capped in silver that begged me to reach up and leave smudgy fingerprints, and there was just more of him than the street had room for. “You don’t look happy.”
“I just got very politely told off by your doctor.”
His brow eased. “He does that.”
“He’s not wrong. That’s the annoying thing.
” I blew out a breath. “I need something to do. Something real.” The words came fast, before I could dress them up.
“Nobody’s going to walk into my office. I know that.
Otho just spelled it out with very small words.
But I can’t help men I’ve never met, and I don’t understand the first thing about how you actually live out here, what the jobs are, what they’re afraid of that isn’t in any file.
” I looked up at him. “You know this town better than anyone in it. Show it to me. The place, the people, all of it. Let me at least know the world before I fail at the job in it.”
He stared at me, his jaw shifting once.
“I have a full day,” he said.
“Then let me shadow you. I won’t get in your way. I’ll just be there, all shadowy.” All shadowy? Really? I tried to keep mortification off my face. Why wasn’t my tongue working?
Remmen studied me for several more heartbeats. Heartbeats that got quicker and quicker by the second. The man had intensity down to an art and my palms were sweaty with the weight of it.
And that was the only reason. It had nothing to do with the fact that he was a seven-foot-tall slab of beefcake with horns I wanted to—
Was it insulting to think of a minotaur as a beefcake?
“Tomorrow morning,” he said, thankfully breaking my train of thought. “I have to check on some things. You can come with.”
It shouldn’t have felt like anything. A busy official taking pity on a new contractor. It landed warm anyway, low in my belly, and I couldn’t talk myself out of it.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t thank me yet.” He was already turning back to his day, the town closing over him like water. “Wear boots, it might get muddy.”