Page 73 of Sheltered in the Storm

If I was an object to this being, they wouldn’t see me as a person and would have no empathy for my suffering. That much was evident already in the utterly unnecessary bolt they’d shot through my shoulder. Maybe it kept me from running, or maybe it was a tracker. Or maybe an incendiary device. The creature had said they would leave me in pieces. A bomb would accomplish that.

A wash of cold and dizziness rolled through me, making me shiver uncontrollably. My ears rang, and my thoughts became fragmented in a growing fog. I’d experienced it enough to know this was shock and blood loss.

Every movement sent white-hot agony through my shoulder, even breathing, but I inhaled as deeply as I could and fought to stay awake. Passing out would doom me. If I was awake, I had a chance to find a way out of this. If I was awake, I could help fight when Vos came.

Because if this creature put one claw on my Vos, by all the gods above and below, I would rip their arms off or die trying.

Something nagged at me, fighting to rise to the surface in my muddled mind. Something about the possibility the bolt in my shoulder was explosive, but I couldn’t quite make sense of what seemed significant about that.

I blinked up at the creature, fighting to focus as another wave of lightheadedness made everything go hazy. Their eyesbobbed in a way that reminded me of Poe, but they lacked her gentleness to go along with the deadly claws and menacing bulk.

“Before you kill me, I’d at least like to know why,” I said. My voice didn’t shake, which was a wonder in itself because the pain in my shoulder had me on the verge of throwing up. “If this is about Vos, and not because of something I’ve done, I think I deserve that much.”

“If you know you are here because of Vos Turek, then you know enough,” they said, clacking their jaw. Maybe speaking Alliance Standard was uncomfortable for them. “You are not innocent in this if you find him worthy of your body and love. Your soul must be as rotten as his.”

Had they been watching us before they attacked? If so, for how long? Surely Vos or I would have noticed if we were under surveillance. Or had they seen something in my eyes when I asked about him that made them think I loved him? I didn’t know the answer to that, and I wasn’t likely to get an explanation.

I wished the past to be past, Vos had told me. But the lives we’d led before we’d come to Iosa were not the sort that made peace likely. Maybe it had only ever been a matter of time before our pasts caught up to us.

And with that thought, the wordbomband the physical characteristics of this creature finally found something in my memory to latch onto.

“N’Vors,” I whispered.

With a nauseating grinding noise like bone on bone, the creature reared up on its back legs, and then came crashing down with most of its enormous weight on its front feet only centimeters from pulverizing my head. Their jaws snapped so close to my nose that they damn near tore off my face.

“Silence, you worthless thing,” they ground out, the words so grating and full of clicking that I barely made them out. “If youinsult my parent’s name again by speaking of them, I will kill you where you lie, and I will do so slowly, with my own hands.”

My breath caught. I was face-to-face with the full-grown offspring of the Kurutan Ambassador N’Vors.

“I know who you are,” I said, my voice tight with grief, pain, anger, and a dozen other emotions. “Vos told me about you. You’re the child he saved on Bordia.”

They clamped their claw onto the head of the bolt in my shoulder and twisted it.

Oh, all the fucking great gods above and below, the pain.

A rush of hot blood ran down my chest from the wound. I rolled to my side and vomited.

“Vos Turek is a murderer,” the Kurutan said, their face centimeters from my own, which was the only reason I could hear them over the ringing in my ears. “He did not save me. Hesparedme. There is a universe of difference.”

The agony was damn near unbearable. With a choked sob, I dug my fingernails into the dirt, as if by hanging on to something—anything—I could keep from passing out. Hot tears of anger ran down my face.

“I have dedicated two standard years to tracking him down,” they continued, “and I will avenge my parent’s death even if it means the end of my own life. Vos Turek will find you dead and know what it is like to lose the one most precious to him.”

Two years?I hurt so, so badly, but at least some of that pain came from the realization this Kurutan had spent two of their five years of life hunting Vos because they mistakenly thought he’d killed N’Vors.

They ran their claw over my bare right shoulder, leaving a bloody incision I barely felt over the rest of my pain.

“You fuck this murderer,” they said. “Youlovethis murderer. Who are you, worthless thing, who would find him worthy of either?”

“I’m not worthless,” I said roughly. “And I’m not athing. I am Calla Wren, survivor of the arenas of Ganai.”

“Oh.” The Kurutan clacked their jaw and rose to stand over me again. “So, a scrap. I see. No one else will have you but Vos Turek. I pity you, then, Calla Wren.”

Every word hit me as hard as physical blows because some part of me believed the same. Still, I rolled to my back once more, holding in whimpers with sheer will alone.

“He did save you,” I rasped. “He was sent to kill your parent, but he wasn’t responsible for their death.”

The Kurutan rested the tip of their claw on the bolt.

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