by Chele Cooke
Before Georgianna had the time to decide whether she should have been running after him, Halden wrapped his arms around her waist and practically lifted her from the ground.
“Suns, Gianna,” he murmured.
Georgianna hesitated for the briefest moment before looping her arms around his shoulders. Tears gathered in her eyes and she buried her face into the crook of his shoulder. An Adveni bumped into them and told them to get out of the way.
Halden wasn’t ready to let go of her completely. He kept a tight hold of her hand and kissed her forehead. Brushing his thumb over the wound on her cheek, he glared at Edtroka’s retreating back over her shoulder and then set off at a fast past, dragging her out of the square.
Georgianna kept checking over her shoulder as they left the square and moved amongst the buildings. Halden wove through people on a wide street, heading towards the Oprust District. She couldn’t see anyone following them, but it didn’t help shake the suspicion that something was wrong. It didn’t make sense that Edtroka would just hand her over to her brother. A niggling in the back of her mind reminded her that it didn’t have to be an Adveni following them. Edtroka, or even Maarqyn could easily have employed someone to follow her undetected, to lead them to Alec and Nyah. She hurried along behind Halden, not pausing to ask the questions she longed to ask, not while she was still unsure whether they were alone.
They turned onto a smaller street, then another, their twisting path leading deeper into the Oprust District and further from the strong Adveni presence in the square. At least here, an Adveni would be easier to spot. Georgianna hoped that if she kept a sharp enough eye out, she would be able to spot a familiar face. Buildings piled against each other, stone up against wood. Small alleyways led off the streets, doors at their ends accessed the backs of buildings that faced onto the next street.
“The Adveni have gone nuts,” Halden hissed over his shoulder. “Since you were captured, they’ve become even worse than before. They’re in the camps all the time now. It’s a mess, Gianna.”
“But what’s that got to do with me?”
“It means we have to…”
Finally, after another check over her shoulder, when she was sure that there was not an Adveni in sight, Georgianna gave a forceful tug on her brother’s arm, wrenching her hand from his grasp.
“Hal!” she ordered, bringing her brother to a sudden stop. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
Halden looked almost as nervous as she did, and he checked over both their shoulders before he answered.
“Soon, Gianna, we’re late.”
She didn’t budge.
“No, Hal. Not soon, now! You just said that things were much worse. What kind of deal did you sign into? What are we late for?”
He didn’t answer her. Reaching out, he slipped his hand into hers and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Georgianna frowned in return, but didn’t stop him as he urged her to continue.
Edtroka had said that he wanted her back in the square at sunrise, and while she’d been confused, Halden had seemed perfectly content with the arrangement. She gritted her teeth in impatient anxiety. What had Halden promised Edtroka? Had her family provided the compensation Edtroka had spoken of? A shudder ran through her shoulders as a thought came to her. Her family could not afford the kind of compensation that Edtroka would have asked, so it had to have been something else they had promised. There were other things the Adveni wanted, things Halden might know. She couldn’t imagine that her brother would sell out others in exchange for her safety, not without being pushed over the edge of desperation.
Like Taye had been.
Georgianna could barely breathe as they turned into the large street that ran the length of the Oprust district. Halden guided her through the crowds going about their business, trading from stalls and shops. Travelling through the Oprust district was the quickest path to the Veniche Camps, but instead of heading across the street and taking one of the smaller roads out of the city, Halden turned left and led her along the road. They stopped just outside the small, run-down Trade Inn.
The door squeaked in protest as he pushed it open, the bottom corner grinding against the stone floor. Georgianna followed him with narrowed eyes. If he had wanted to talk to her, there were better places, places where she could also see her father and Braedon. Her chest ached at the thought of them and she wondered if it had been her father’s desperation, not Halden’s, which had led to this deal. Perhaps it was them that they were late to meet with.
The Trade Inn was filled with people, very few chairs remaining unoccupied. Groups of men sat around large tables, paying each other no attention as they devoured their food and sipped on drinks. A melody of chatter, spoons in bowls and cups on tables was accompanied by the clanging and scraping of pots on the stone fireplace at the back. The middle-aged man behind the counter occasionally added the odd groan or swearword to the mix.
Halden pulled her through the tables. The door, jammed on the stone floor, allowed a waft of warm air to enter. After a moment, one grumbling patron got up from his seat to push it closed, even though the air would be all the staler for it, a mingling of sweat, meat, and home-brewed wheat beer.
Her heart thumped painfully beneath her breast. She was so caught up trying to work out how Halden had made a deal with Edtroka and what he’d promised him that she walked straight into Halden’s back when he stopped. She wavered for a moment and he stepped out of the way, releasing her hand.
“Hi George.”
She froze. She knew that voice.
In front of her, at a table with two seats waiting for them, stood Keiran Zanetti.
Keiran pushed the chair out of the way, easing himself out from between the tables. There was a hesitation to him that she had never seen before, not when it came to her, anyway. He’d always been so confident and charming. This anxious expression didn’t suit him. His hair was a little longer and the stubble of a growing beard was more pronounced on his jaw, but his eyes were the same pale blue that shone for her in the darkness. And his smile, now he’d found it, sent shivers down her legs into her toes.
She remembered the last conversation she’d had with Halden about Keiran. He’d been annoyed at her because she refused to acknowledge the relationship they had. Yet now he had an accepting smile on his lips. Whatever worries he’d had about their relationship were gone. She could only imagine that her family had blamed the Belsa and Keiran for her arrest and she couldn’t think of a way that Keiran would have been able to convince them otherwise. That was, unless Halden had not been the one to bargain the deal with Edtroka? She stepped forwards.
She’d been waiting to see him. Every day in the compound, especially since his note had arrived, she had thought of seeing him again. Keiran reached out first, his fingers on her jaw, gently brushing the bruise on her cheekbone. He drew her forwards and placed a soft kiss on her forehead, her temple, her cheek and then the corner of her lips. She turned towards him then, settling her lips against his tender flesh. His fingers disappeared into her hair, holding the nape of her neck as he urged her up to him, sharing breath, sharing longing.
His lips tasted of wheat beer and yapoque smoke. He’d been worried. She could imagine him standing outside the Trade Inn, smoking while he waited before coming inside to get a drink. The taste of him was sweet against her tongue.
His skin was smooth and warm, just the way she remembered it. His fingertips pressed into the small of her back, pulling her closer. She gripped his arms and clung on, hoping she hadn’t been imagining it all, scared he might evaporate into the smoke of his cigarettes.
Next to them, Halden cleared his throat.
Georgianna pulled back. Maybe Keiran had done enough to earn Halden’s approval, but she doubted anything was enough for an extended display of affection. The problem was she wasn’t ready to put any space between them. Weeks of thinking of him, wondering whether he was safe, if he really was going to help her, had built up into a pit of longing that had
not yet been filled.
The tip of her nose bumped against his and he placed another soft kiss at the corner of her lips. She slid her hands up to his shoulders and pulled herself against him, her cheek against his as she hugged him tightly. Keiran’s arms wound around her waist, kissing her temple again.
When he moved back, the anxious expression was gone, replaced by critical examination. His gaze swept across her face, down her neck and back to the injury on her cheek.
“He hurt you.”
She shook her head. His thumb brushed against her cheek again and behind his frown, she could see his jaw tightening. Georgianna grasped his wrist.
“No,” she assured him. “It wasn’t him.”
“Who then? He’s had you for days,” Halden insisted. “I’m no medic, but I know that mark is new.”
She avoided looking at either of them.
“It doesn’t matter, it was nothing.”
Although, it didn’t feel like nothing, not when Maarqyn was promising to take her away from Edtroka and make her tell him where Alec and Nyah were hiding. Still, Halden had looked so pleased to see her and they had made this deal happen, whatever it was they had promised. She couldn’t burden them any more than that.
Keiran rounded on Halden as they manoeuvred around the table and took a seat.
“You’re late.”
“Next time, make your own damned appointments, then,” Halden answered with a triumphant smirk, rocking onto the back legs of his chair. “Not that I’m not happy to see my sister, but I don’t know why you were so adamant that you not go.”
Keiran moved closer to her, his thigh pressed against hers.
“How do you think that’d look? It made more sense that it was you.”
“Will one of you tell me what’s going on?” Georgianna asked in growing frustration. The thrill of seeing her brother and Keiran was wearing off and she was back to feeling anxious. “How did you do this?”
She shifted to look at Keiran. He rubbed his jaw and looked at her brother instead. Georgianna followed his gaze, but Halden simply grinned and shook his head. Whatever had been done, it had been Keiran who did it.
“Alright,” Keiran huffed, leaning forwards to rest his elbow on the table, shielding them from the rest of the café. “I made a deal.”
“How?”
Keiran licked his bottom lip. There was something odd about him. Keiran, while private, had never hidden his triumphs from her. If anything constituted a triumph, surely freeing someone from the compound did. After things going wrong with Alec’s and Nyah’s escape, the fact she was sitting here was amazing. So why did he look so worried?
“I knew there was no chance of getting you out of the compound by force,” he explained quietly. “And if you were sold, it would be a long time before you were let out, with or without a collar. I told Halden what had happened, like you asked, and when I suggested getting you back, we agreed that I would speak to Liliah.”
Georgianna blinked in surprise.
“Liliah? Why?”
Halden pushed himself further back on the chair, wavering precariously in a way he had been constantly reprimanded for as a child. He held on to the edge of the table, knuckles pale against the wood.
“She worked with you in that bar,” Halden said. “She saw you with Adveni. She was the only person I could think of who might know someone who could help you.”
“And she did, George,” Keiran interjected. “Liliah explained that she’d seen you talking to a guard, someone you seemed on good terms with. It took us a while to figure out which guard it was, but once we did, we approached him.”
Liliah had been rather amused by Georgianna’s conversation with Edtroka when he’d visited her in Crisco. Not many Adveni stuck around to chat to the Veniche behind the bar, let alone teasing them the way he had.
“So, you offered him money to buy me?”
Keiran took a swig from his drink before he answered.
“Something like that.”
“What was it?” she asked.
Keiran shook his head.
“It doesn’t matter, George. It’s already done. Just be happy.”
Georgianna wasn’t sure. She stared across the café, thinking that it all seemed too good to be true. Had this been her own plan, she would have been sure that it would all fall apart. However, from the sounds of it, nothing had gone wrong. Edtroka had helped them. He’d helped her.
She’d thought that Edtroka acting so cold to her in the compound before buying her was simply a tactic of keeping himself distant, so that no one would suspect that he was making a deal under the table. She might have understood it if he’d wanted her the way Maarqyn did, if he thought she had information, but why go to all that effort for Keiran and Halden, two men he didn’t know?
She shook herself and stopped trying to pick the deal apart. It had already worked. She was here. She had to let the questions go.
“So, what happens now?”
“Now you…”
“Actually,” Halden interrupted. “Grystch said that he wants her back at sunrise.”
“That wasn’t what we agreed.”
“Don’t ask me. Take it up with him. He asked if I knew the arrangement and said he wants her at the end of his shift, back in Javeknell.”
Keiran let out a huff of annoyance and slumped back in his chair. Rubbing his hand across his face, he hissed through his teeth in frustration.
“I should get you down to Medic’s Way now then.”
Georgianna frowned. She appreciated everything Keiran had done and knew that the price he had paid could not have been cheap. She couldn’t begin to imagine the things he’d had to do to get the money together, but she also knew that she couldn’t go ambling off to Medic’s Way as if nothing had happened.
“I can’t.”
Keiran raised his eyebrow in a silent question that she didn’t need asked out loud. Whether Keiran would understand it or not didn’t matter. Before she went anywhere with him, before she thought about the Belsa or the life she now found herself in, before any of it, there was someone she needed to see.
Halden left them outside the Trade Inn with an embrace and a promise that he would see her soon, as well as a warning that she should keep herself safe above all else. Having lost a morning’s work to meet her, Halden had at least to show his face if he were to salvage the day.
She and Keiran left the Oprust district, heading out towards the camps. For the first part of the walk, they remained quiet. There were a thousand questions that she wanted to ask him, but—beyond Keiran confirming that the others were safe, a question he brushed off with a grunt—she kept them to herself. Somehow, it didn’t seem like the right time. It was all so much to take in and she didn’t dare rush it for fear that the whole day would crumble around her and prove to be nothing more than a drysta’s desperate dream.
Keiran didn’t talk much and she wondered whether he didn’t know what to say, or if he was giving her time for everything to sink in. Either way, she was grateful for the quiet. He kept his distance as they walked under the harsh glare of the sun and the watchful eyes of those they passed. Nothing more than the brush of his hand against hers. Georgianna kept her gaze on the path ahead, but her heart raced with tingles of longing and fear at each contact.
The first time they passed an Adveni in the camps, Georgianna gawked until Keiran tugged her away. Halden had mentioned that the Adveni had increased their presence, and she’d seen Adveni out in the camps before, but this was different. In the years before, Adveni would pass through the camps, but rarely stay long. This soldier just stood there on the corner and, as they walked further, she spotted more and more of them. Just as they lost sight of the last, a new one would become visible ahead. Each wore full uniform and was loaded with weaponry. After the first, she was smart enough to keep her gaze fixed on the ground.
Her house was quiet as they approached. The door stood open, but even a dozen steps from the threshold, she could hear
no signs of life inside. For a moment, she feared that her father was out. The open door meant that he wouldn’t have ventured far, but there was no way of knowing in which direction he would have gone.
She stepped into the shadows, fingers brushing the doorframe as she craned her neck to look into the kitchen. Her breath came in quick gasps from the nerves she had not expected. Halden would have told her if something had happened, but her father’s disappointment and disapproval was weighing on her. She had always promised him that she would be careful, that working for the Belsa would not put her in danger. Now, here she was, no longer a young girl who had broken something she wasn’t supposed to have been playing with, but a grown woman who could still not find her own way out of the mess she had created.
At the sound of their footsteps, the door to Braedon and Halden’s bedroom was pulled tentatively open. Wide, cautious eyes peered back at her before a small body lunged forwards.
Georgianna crouched, gathering her nephew, Braedon, into her arms. She hugged him tightly against her and pressed her hand to the back of his head when he buried his face into her neck. At the sound of sniffing, however, she pulled back. His expression was not one of elation at seeing her, but of sadness. Tears brimmed along his lashes and his bottom lip trembled ominously.
“Brae?” she whispered, cupping his face. “Brae, what’s wrong?”
“Grandda’ mad at me,” he sniffed, and pushed past her hands to shield himself against her body.
She slid down onto her knees and held Braedon as he sobbed. Keiran frowned above them, but as she opened her mouth, Keiran forced a grin and stepped forwards. He grasped Braedon by the waist, lifting the young boy up to rest on his hip.
“I’ve been told you have a foal out back.”
Braedon rubbed the side of his hand under his nose and nodded.