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The guards do not respect it, not even a little bit. He is dragged off, his fancy golden armor clanging with a particularly hollow sound against the stone floor.
“I’ve got you,” Azlan says, reassuring me and nuzzling me with his big, warm face. “You’re safe now. I’ve got you.”
“Have to be honest, I don’t think I was ever in danger,” I mumble back.
“What? How can you say that? Look at the cage. Look at the….”
“You need to talk to your brother,” I tell Azlan. “He’s not just evil.”
“I have no desire to speak to Kain. I came for you.”
“I know, but he’s acting out because he’s sad. Deeply sad. The kind of sad that makes you kill and stuff your own father, sad. He’s not okay.”
“I am well aware he is not okay. I am worried about you, Ava. As usual, you seem to have forgotten you exist. You have been kept in a cage for days. You have been subject to humiliation, fear…”
“He didn’t touch me,” I reassure Azlan. “He just wanted a captive audience, and he wanted to show that he was clever. He’s like a cub in a full-grown body. Everything he wants and desires are just basic things we all need.”
“Captive madness,” Azlan muses, giving me a searching look.
“Come again?”
“It is when a captive begins to identify with her captor so she can survive.”
“I’m not mad,” I say. “And yeah, maybe I do understand Kain a little more now, but there has been enough death and rejection. Too much of both. Your brothers need you. Your whole fucking world needs you, Azlan.”
“And I need you,” he says, nuzzling me.
“You’ve got me.”
“Do I? When you put every waif, stray, and psychopath before your own wellbeing? Am I ever going to be able to be certain that you have not run off in the night to save some wayward soul against my wishes?”
“I guess you’ll just have to make me a mother so all that nurturing, rescuing energy has somewhere to go,” I suggest with a smile.
“Yes,” Azlan agrees. “That is a very, very good idea.”
“As soon as the females are freed and returned to their cubs, of course.”
“Of course,” he says. “I know you couldn’t possibly enjoy being ravaged into submission if you did not first know you had put the world to rights.”
“You’re the same as I am,” I say. “Kain told me all about you, how you saved him and the other lost, dumped boys. How you suffered to survive, how you built the pride lands from nothing…”
Azlan is carrying me away now, out of the Den and back to the ship. As I speak, he lets out a series of soft and occasionally deep growls.
“He told you my life story, did he?”
“He looks up to you.”
“He has a strange way of showing it.”
“He has a broken, traumatized way of showing it,” I agree.
“I don’t want to talk about Kain anymore,” Azlan growls. “I don’t want talking of any kind anymore. I need you.”
I need him too.
We are in our ship bedroom again, the place that most feels like home, and the place I most often seem to end up when I am in trouble.
Buttface is there, to my great relief. I scoop him up into my arms and hold him close, while he gives me a sleepy and offended look for having interrupted his nap.
