Page 23 of Omega’s Fealty

I have one spare set of clothes on this barge: a gray t-shirt, a hoodie and a pair of sweats I sleep in when it’s cold. They are going to hang off him like a sail.

“Can you sit up?”

He can, with my arm behind him. He sits with his head down and his hands loose in his lap while I wring out the rag, and when I put it to his face he flinches hard and then holds still.

I’m as gentle as I can be.

I’ve washed my own face after fights and I’ve washed blood off other men in the back of vans. I never bothered with gentleness then but it comes naturally now. Forehead, eyes, the crust at the corner of his mouth. Down his neck. His shoulders under my hands are all bone and heat.

He doesn’t say anything and neither do I. The rag goes in the pan, comes out, goes back.

I lift him up, lift the shirt off of him. Under it, his skin is very pale and there is not a mark on him anywhere, not a scar. Not one thing that has ever been let happen to him.

He smells like soap now.

And me. I shouldn’t like that but I do. His scent is still there soft and faint under all of it, but growing stronger now. I keep my eyes on the rag.

“Arms up.”

I pull my duffel bag closer and find the shirt. He gets the t-shirt on himself, slow. His head comes out through the neck of it with his hair standing up and his eyes shut, then he pulls the collar up over his nose and breathes in and keeps it there, and something goes through me that I have no business feeling.

“That’s mine,” I say. Stupidly.

“I know.” He doesn’t take his face out of it. “It smells like you.”

I get the sweats on him with a lot of him saying he can do it and not being able to.

Then he lies down again on the blankets with the jacket over the top of everything and his knees pulled up. For a moment, I think he’s gone to sleep. I start to get up.

“Don’t.” His hand is out of the jacket and on my wrist. He is not looking at me. “Don’t go. Please.”

I need to go. This has already gone much too far, but I sit back down.

He sleeps most of the day. I don’t, even though I haven’t slept in over twenty-four hours and I am exhausted.

I lean against the pallet where he can reach me if he wants to and mostly he doesn’t, but twice his hand comes out and finds my arm, holds on and goes slack again. Both times I stay very still until it does. I feed him water when he surfaces.

I go out once to bring the burner phone down from the deck because it has been buzzing.

It is Sully checking in, and I stand in the hold with the door open behind me and the prince asleep in my clothes ten feet away and I tell him all quiet.

“Good,” Sully says. “Stays that way.”

I don’t know what I am doing. I am sitting on the floor of a shipping container with my hand in a kidnapped crown prince’s hand, because it feels like he needs it there.

Every hour I sit there is an hour closer to whoever I am working for coming for him but I am not thinking about that. I am thinking about the fact that he has stopped shaking.

He is working me. Maybe not right now. He is too weak but he would be a fool not to take advantage of this. He’s no fool. He’s going to work what has happened here.

Late in the afternoon he wakes up properly. I know before I look because the scent changes.

There is still soap and sweat and me, but under it, coming back up through the rest of it like a tide, is that intoxicating strawberry and vanilla. It is stronger than it was this morning.

Stronger, I think, than yesterday. His heat might have been delayed but it is still coming.

Twenty-four hours of him being sick as a dog and it has bought us a day.

Maybe less.