Page 26 of Remmen

She had no idea what she was threatening me with. Taking Anne away might kill me, and Nezara had no idea she had just unsheathed a blade.

I kept still. I’d stood across a pit from beasts who meant to open me up and given away less than I was holding back now.

It was simple, and it was vicious.

If the program failed, they took Anne and posted her to some other rock that would use her, and I’d have begged this whole thing into being only to watch it hand her back to the dark between the stars. And if it didn’t fail, if she stayed, she remained forbidden, a woman I could stand beside in a doorway and never touch, and one slip in front of the wrong eyes cut the town’s lifeline and shipped her off regardless.

Every road ran to the same place. Her, gone.

I had to set my cup down before I spilled it. My hands weren’t shaking, but it was a close thing.

It was too big for what it should have been. I’d known her weeks. Men lost women all the time and stayed standing; I’d buried better men than me who’d done it. But I pictured a shuttle lifting her off this planet and couldn’t get past it.

I didn’t have a word for it. I didn’t want one.

I’d spent years telling bulls to want what they were allowed to have. I could have taken a bride off the next transport, a woman who’d crossed the stars hoping to be wanted.

Instead I’d gone and fixed on the one human on Ceres-9 it was a crime to touch.

Nezara let me sit in it a moment, then gathered her folder and bid me good day.

I sat with the threat, and then I got to work.

When Korfas brought the afternoon’s messages, I told him to ride out to the ranch and see the thing with his own eyes, the animal Rauf had sworn to me he’d put down.

Korfas set the messages on my desk, slow and deliberate. “You want me to go ask the Butchers whether they killed their vicious monster?”

“I want you to go look.”

“And if it’s still breathing?”

“Then you ride back and tell me, and you do not do one damned thing else.” He didn’t like it. I didn’t blame him; nobody with sense wanted to walk that yard and face what was chained at the back of it. “Use your eyes. You don’t go in.”

He blew out a breath through his nose. “They’ll lie to my face.”

“Then watch their hands while they do it.”

He was sour about it, but he went.

The other job was mine.

Nezara was right about the numbers, and I was finished waiting for the men of this town to walk through Anne’s door on their own. They wouldn’t. Not these men. They’d set a bone with their teeth before they’d sit in a chair and let a small human ask them how they felt.

Waiting on them was begging for failure.

I was done waiting. If the men wouldn’t go to Anne, I would bring Anne the men. Drag them if it came to that, one at a time, and I’d start with the hardest case I had.

Zarcal and I did not talk about the pit. And we didn’t talk about that night a few months ago when he almost killed a bride while his mind was lost to his past. But Zarcal was the entire reason for the counselors. I hadn’t forced the issue when they arrived, hoping he would walk into someone’s office on his own.

He hadn’t.

I put on my coat and went to find him.

Zarcal was tending to the edge of the fence in his yard. He didn’t look up when my shadow fell across his work.

“No,” he said.

“You don’t know what I’m going to ask.”