Page 12 of Fifth
“I’m not a machine for timing your breath.”
“You are a heart.” His voice eased, and the sound of it made something old and tender inside her ache. “Let me hear it steady.”
She exhaled. Inhaled. Her ribs rose under his palm. He matched the rhythm exactly, breath for breath, breast to chest, until their bodies settled into one cadence. It was like standing in the shore break and letting the waves take control until balance returned. He knew what he was doing. He was regulating her system with his own. She didn’t know the language for it. Perhaps anger, adrenaline, arousal, or fear? He turned each one down by bringing them into line with each breath.
Unable to help herself, she turned her face toward him, cheek brushing the firm plane of his bicep. The faintest shimmer of light gilded his skin, not a glow, just a suggestion that warmth could be visible if it wanted to be. He wasn’t human. Nothing about him would let her forget that. And yet the lines of him were so precise and so mercilessly beautiful that her fingers itched to map them, as if touch could make sense of what sight couldn’t.
“All right, Locus,” she said. “Begin at the beginning. Tell me about yourself so I can understand you better.”
He didn’t rush. “You already know that I am Fifth. It is my rank inside my unit. Sixth is our Apex, in both designation and name.”
“Apex. Is that your leader?”
“Affirmative.”
“So, you’re one under the leader?”
“I am his Enforcer.” He looked past her, into the slim wedge of sky, where smoke from distant fires smudged the stars. “Our Final Flights normally finish us when we reach four hundred years. Mine did not finish.”
“Wait. You’re four hundred years old?”
“Affirmative,” he repeated. “Four hundred and twelve.”
He breathed once, deeply. The movement slid heat against her hip. She considered the immensity of living for so long and how she’d handle it if it were her. Then, his comment about a Final Flight snagged her attention.”What does that mean, that your Final flight didn’t finish?”
“My people—Intergalactic Warriors—ascend through a Final Flight. But I did not ascend. Ibit into the fruit of your world and the heat went out of me. My brothers call it an apple and say it gives us added life.”
“And that’s why you came here?”
“Affirmative.” He angled his head so he could see her without lifting. “My brothers took human women and it tempered them, gave them focus and purpose. Iwish the same, so I came to take a bride because I believe that is the way.”
Her mouth went dry again. “You came to buy me.”
“I came to buy someone,” he agreed, and the honesty of it stung more than any lie. “And then I saw you and I knew you were the one.”
“Romantic,” she said, the word brittle, knowing that saying it any other way would make it soft, and she didn’t know how to survivesoft.
He didn’t apologize. “I am not romantic.”
Her mind skittered between anger and curiosity, anxious to pry past his practiced answers. She wanted something raw, something he had never offered anyone else. “Then tell me something truthful. Something that is only for me,” she said, voicethin.
“I have told you only truth.”
“Tell me something that isn’t an answer you have said a hundred times before.”
His inverted brows tilted and his pointed ears twitched, asmall shift that looked like curiosity. “I did not know what your mouth would feel like,” he said. “I knew it would be soft. Idid not know that softness could have weight. Idid not know it would taste like this afterward. Like heat set into my bones.”
Her breath caught. She wanted to be angry, but couldn’t find the angle for it. There was nothing slick in the way he said it. There was only fact, spoken like a man who trusted numbers before poetry and had discovered that the body keeps a math of itsown.
“And you claim you’re not romantic?” she whispered.
“No,” he said. “I am honest.”
She stared at him. The amusement that threatened to lift the corner of her mouth wasn’t small anymore. She hid it by tipping her head to the side and letting her hair fall forward. He reached without thinking and smoothed it back. The gesture was so gentle that her throathurt.
“What about you?” he asked. “You have not spoken a word about your people since we left the cage.”
“Because my people are complicated.” The sentence came out in a rush. “Because if I say my grandmother’s name out loud, Iwill want to cry. Because if I tell you about the lake where I used to run in summer when the heat swelled the air, Iwill sit down and refuse to move. Because I long for my parents and my brothers and sister.”
