Thyran reaches the bidding area. He’s enormous among the crowd. Everyone near him has to lean back. His breathing is rough. His hands are at his sides, clenched.
He doesn't look at the other bidder. He doesn't look at the auctioneer. He looks at me.
He reaches into his pack. Pulls out a claw, pale as bone. Sets it on the bidding table.
I held that claw. The night he told me about Vortek, he opened a chest he hadn't touched in seven years and put it in my hand. I closed his fingers back around it.
He’s giving it away.
A pelt of white fur, thick, a mountain cat’s winter coat. Teeth. Small bones. More claws. Piece after piece laid out in a row on the table. Everything his brother brought home. Everything he saved.
He doesn't speak. He just sets them down, one by one, his hands steady, his face open and wrecked.
The auctioneer looks at the trophies. Looks at me. He knows what he’s seeing.
The crowd knows too. The bidding has gone quiet. The stone creature watches Thyran unpack his dead brother’s legacy onto a market table. Then he looks at me. Studies my face. Whatever he finds there makes him turn away from the bidding table without a word.
Not because Thyran is bigger. Not because he’s afraid. Because the woman on the platform is not the woman he bid on. He wanted a tool. A pair of skilled hands with no attachments.
What he’s looking at now is a woman whose whole body is angled toward the frost giant at the edge of the crowd. Damaged goods, by his accounting. He’s already scanning the staging area for the next lot.
The auctioneer clears his throat. “Bride. Do you choose?”
I have read every exit in this plaza. I am not going to use any of them.
I look at the other bidder. Safe. Still. Useful. Everything I came here for.
I look at Thyran. His hands at his sides, clenched. Shaking. His brother’s trophies spread across the table. Seven years of grief traded for the chance that I'll say his name.
I have spent weeks hedging. “Probably.” “Okay.” “Fine.” Every word with a qualifier. An escape route. I have never said a sentence in this man’s presence that didn't have a door built into it.
“I choose Thyran.”
Three words. No modifier. No qualification. No “probably” and no “I think” and no door I can back through later. The first sentence I've said since the Wastes that doesn't have an exit built into it.
He stands at the base of the platform. Not moving. Looking up at me the way he looked down at me in the snow the day he found me. The same expression. The same tremor in his whole body.
He doesn't come up the steps. He waits.
I walk down.
Three steps. The stone is solid under my boots. His boots. I walk off the platform and into the heat of him and I press my face against his chest the way I pressed it into his fur that first day in the snow, when my body wanted to live and my mind had quit. His arms close around me. His hand spreads across my back, covering the span from my shoulder blade to my spine. The same hand. The same place. His fingers flex against me once, twice, and go still.
“You left.” Not anger. Something underneath that’s worse.
“I know.”
“Don't.” His voice breaks. His hand tightens against my back. “Again. Don't.”
“I won't.”
He pulls me closer. Lifts me off the ground the way he did in the Wastes, one arm under me, pulling me flush to his chest. My face against his neck. His pulse under my lips. His whole body shaking. Around us the market is loud and the auctioneer is saying something about contracts and the crowd is moving and none of it reaches us.
His heat soaking through my clothes, through my skin, into the places where I've been cold since I walked out his door.
I put my arms around his neck. I hold on.
THYRAN
