"You’re purring," Lethe says.
"I don’t purr."
"You’re absolutely purring."
He is.
A low, constant vibration deep in his chest, a sound he did not know his body could make, an involuntary response to the weight of the boy on his skin and the fire burning low and the stars above and the feeling of being, for the first time in his memory, completely and irreversibly content.
He doesn’t stop.
Lethe smiles against his chest. His finger keeps tracing. The fire crackles. The stars turn above them.
Zazyrus purrs, and holds the bravest person he has ever known, and does not sleep because sleeping would mean missing a single second of this.
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter 29
The bounty hunters find them on the southern road.
Lethe sees them first.
He has developed a habit of scanning crowds and roads and tree lines with the particular, ambient vigilance of a person who expects the world to produce threats and prepares accordingly. It is not anxiety. It is competence. The wolf watches because the wolf learned, in six years of captivity, that the thing that kills you is the thing you didn’t see coming.
There are four of them. Three men and a woman, mounted, armed, wearing the leather and iron of professional trackers. They are positioned at the bend in the road where the trees thin and the sightlines open, and they are not travelers and they are not merchants and they are not bandits. Bandits pick targets of opportunity. These people are waiting for something specific.
Lethe’s hand finds Zazyrus’s wrist.
"Don’t look up," he murmurs. "Road bend. Four riders. Armed."
Zazyrus’s body changes beside him. The shift is invisible to anyone who doesn’t know him the way Lethe knows him: asubtle redistribution of weight, a tension in the shoulders, the tail going rigid behind him. His eyes stay forward. His stride doesn’t break.
"Hunters," Zazyrus says. Low. Flat.
"Demos sent them."
The words come out steady, but the thing they confirm sends a cold thread through Lethe’s chest. Demos is not dead. Demos is alive and he has sent people to reclaim his property. Zazyrus is the most valuable thing he has ever owned and the pit lord will not let him go. Will not let either of them go.
The lead hunter kicks his horse forward when they are twenty paces out.
"Zazyrus of the deep cages." The man’s voice is loud and professional and bored in the way that people who do violence for money are bored by the preliminaries. "Property of Demos. You’re to come with us. The healer too."
The healer too.
Not just the beast. Both of them. Demos wants them both back and the wanting is not about money, not entirely. The wanting is about ownership and the refusal to accept its end. Lethe saidI was never yoursin the exit corridor and Demos heard it and the hearing broke something in the man’s pride that the broken bones and the humiliation couldn’t reach.
Zazyrus steps forward.
One step. The same step he took in the exit corridor, controlled and unhurried, the ground shifting beneath it. The lead hunter’s horse shies sideways and the hunter’s hand tightens on his reins.
"We can do this easy or hard," the hunter says. His hand moves to the weapon on his hip. "Easy is you come quiet. Hard is we put the beast down and take the healer anyway."
The time the fight is not short.
Four professionals are different from six pit guards with crossbows and a narrow corridor. These are people who track and capture beasts for a living. They know how to space themselves. They know how to flank. They know the angles and the distances and the vulnerabilities of creatures larger than themselves, and they have clearly been briefed on Zazyrus specifically because they go for his horns first.
A weighted net. Thrown from the right while the lead hunter engages from the front, a practiced diversion, and the net catches Zazyrus’s horns and wraps and the weight of it pulls his head down and the disorientation is immediate. He tears through the net with his claws but the seconds it costs him are seconds the hunters use to close the distance and the fight becomes close and brutal and messy.
