Page 2 of C is for Captive

And now he was watching her.

Those silver eyes held hers, and for one suspended moment she forgot the guard behind her, forgot about the bowl, and forgot about her careful invisible life. He saw her. Not the food boy, not the disguise. Her. It struck her with terrifying certainty, as though he’d reached through the disguise she’d worn for four years and set one enormous finger on the truth of who she was beneath it.

The guard’s boots scraped on the stone behind her.

“I said back off,” he barked. “You deaf as well as ugly? Move.”

She jerked upright and stepped back, her pulse roaring in her ears. She turned for the door on legs that didn’t quite feel like hers.

Behind her, low and rough and unmistakably deliberate, the prisoner growled. Just once. But she’d have sworn, all the way up those slick narrow stairs and out into the hard bright day, that it had been meant for her.

CHAPTER TWO

The scent had reached Brannik before the cell door had finished opening, but he kept his head down, his hair over his face, and his breathing slow and even the way he’d breathed for two days now. Every meal came the same way. The stink of the guard first, the sour reek of a body that rarely washed with cheap liquor oozing out through his pores. Then the false warmth of the food. He’d learned to sort the smells apart the way another male might sort coins in the dark.

This time there was a third smell, and it stopped the breath in his chest. A faint clean smell beneath road-dust and something oily she’d used on her skin, but unmistakable. Warm. Female.

He did not lift his head. He kept every muscle exactly where it had been, kept his shoulders slack against the raw stone, and let his mind go still.

A female. A human female.

He’d worked cargo across more ports than he could name, and sat elbow to elbow with a hundred kinds of people in a hundred filthy dockside bars, and he’d only encountered that scent once before in twenty years of drifting. And the guard had no idea.

That was the part that snagged him. The Ordanian stood there in the doorway with his anvil jaw and his stupid grin, close enough to touch her, and he smelled nothing. Called her boy. The disguise was good, he recognized that, the loose clothes swallowing whatever shape she had, the hood pulled low, and the muddied cast she had smeared over her face and hands. Good enough to fool a bored guard who saw only what he expected to see.

It did not fool him.

She crossed the cell, her head down, and he watched the way she moved through the curtain of his hair. It wasn’t the shuffle of a slow-witted errand runner. Her movements were deliberate and controlled. A body that knew exactly how much space it took up and had decided to take up less. He knew that walk. He’d built his own version of it over years.

She set the tray down within easy reach of his hands, which was a courtesy the guards hadn’t bothered with, and he caught the small hitch in her breath when she saw the state of him up close. The bruises. The raw meat of his wrists. She didn’t like it. He filed that away, then made a decision he didn’t entirely understand, and lifted his head.

She froze.

He looked at her and let her look at him, and for a moment neither of them moved. Her eyes went wide. Hazel eyes, in a face too fine-boned and soft for the male she pretended to be, despite the mottled grey covering her skin. He watched the recognition move through her, and watched her understand that he was not the vicious animal she’d been told. She was quick. She caught it in half a second, and in the next half-second she smoothed it away. Not quick enough to fool him, but quick enough that the guard would never notice.

“I said back off.” The Ordanian’s boots scraped the floor. “You deaf as well as ugly? Move.”

Something turned over in his chest, hot and unfamiliar.

He’d sat still through worse. He’d sat still while they hit him and burned him, while they ran current through the collar until his vision whited out and his own body betrayed him, and he had given them nothing but growls and the occasional lunge, buying himself time and information with his silence. He had discipline the way other males had bones. It held him up. It kept him alive.

And a fat drunk fool calling a hidden female ugly nearly cracked it.

The urge to snap the cargo cuffs, cross the cell in one stride, and break that anvil jaw came hard and fast. He’d known he could do it since the first hour. The restraints were built for freight, not for a Tuori who’d spent his childhood being broken to Tuori standards, and the collar was the only real problem, and even the collar had a pattern to it he’d nearly finished mapping.

He didn’t move.

He let the growl build instead, low in his chest, and let it roll out slowly so the guard would think it was aimed at him, at the food, at the world. The Ordanian flinched back a half-step and swore, and covered the flinch with more shouting, and the female was already at the door, already leaving, her clean scent thinning in the damp air.

That was for you, he thought, watching the empty doorway. Not for him.

The door groaned shut, and the lock cycled. The buzzing light overhead flickered and steadied.

He looked at the tray. Bread that smelled almost good. Stew, thick and brown, that smelled almost like food, and he’d learned within his first meal here that it was not. At least not for him.

The majority of the stew was pressed and flavored plant protein, the kind they fed to indentured labor and prisoners, the kind his Tuori body couldn’t process. His Aurelian mother could have processed it, but his father’s blood ran too strong in him for that. Half a bowl of the stuff would leave him doubled over and sick as a child. The guards didn’t know that. If they’d deliberately been trying to make him ill, they’d have found something worse. This was only carelessness. The same slop for every cage.

He picked out the two pieces of meat-based protein and left the rest of the stew where it sat. He grabbed the bread round and stuffed it down, then leaned his head back against the stone. The cold seeped through his hair into his skull, and he let it, observing his body as he observed everything. Weaker than two days ago. The paralytic they’d hit him with was long out of his system, but hunger was a slower drug and it was doing its work. His wrists ached in the cuffs. The cut on his forearm itched as it tried again to knit. But below all of it, the strength was still there. He’d been careful to hide how much.