“Average,” she said as her stomach rolled. “Why?”
“I need to get this off.” He tugged at his beard and hair. “And without scissors and a razor, I’m going to need help.”
“Mirror,” she added.
“Huh?”
“You’d also do well to have a mirror.” She shifted onto her knees and unholstered her hunting knife. “But I can do it. My father used to shave with a straight edge and he taught me how.”
“You mind if we go over there?” Duran nodded at the bunk. “I’m aching.”
As he got his height and weight off the floor, he grunted and there were cracking sounds, like branches snapping during the dry fall. Also a pop or two that made her wonder if he wasn’t going to need to have a bone set.
“How old are you?” she blurted.
“I don’t keep track of those things. But I am certainly too young to be moving like this.” He limped over and groaned as he sat himself down on the thin, bare mattress. “Too many broken things healed in bad ways.”
Ahmare took her time getting to her feet. Otherwise, it felt like she was showing off the fact that she didn’t hurt all over.
As she approached him with the knife, she was amazed that he sat there so calmly as someone he didn’t know came toward him with a shiny blade capable of doing damage—
Without warning, the Mississippi delta of blood spilling from Rollie’s open, ragged neck barged in, an out-of-order interloper that she would rather have stayed away from her proverbial establishment. God, if she never thought about that death again, it would be too soon. The trouble was, she couldn’t ignore the fact that the last time she had had this hilt in her palm, it had been to kill.
Now, it was to shave.
Could she be like the blade? she wondered. Could she turn away from carnage and return to the mundane? Along those lines, after all this, what would she be like, if she survived?
She thought of that hand analogy that she’d given the Shadow, the one where Rollie’s dead fingers penetrated the big divide in her life and contaminated her peaceable past. Except maybe the contamination hadn’t started with Rollie. Maybe it had started with the raids, with the death of her parents. Maybe that was the beginning of everything turning toxic and her present circumstance was a trickle-down of her parents’ blood being spilled.
Maybe she’d gotten the timeline wrong, even if her conclusion was right.
“Well?” the prisoner prompted.
She had come to stand before him, she realized, and she was staring down at his bearded face without seeing him.
“Sorry,” she said as she put the trigger in her back pocket and tried to focus on how she was going to get rid of that facial hair without cutting him.
When he reached out and took her hand, she jumped, but all he did was hold on to her, a solid, surprisingly calm anchor amidst the chaos.
“It’s okay.” His voice was soft. “I know what it’s like to have the world disappear behind things you’d rather not re-see. You can take your time coming back, and not just because we’ve got hours ahead of us.”
Ahmare looked down at where they had unexpectedly connected. His palm dwarfed hers, but the warmth of his skin was exactly the same as her own.
His thumb, his nail-less, bruised thumb, stroked over her twice.
Then he dropped his hold and tilted his chin up, ready whenever she was.
Tears formed in Ahmare’s eyes, making him wavy. She could handle anything but kindness, she realized.
The female was absolutely stunning, Duran thought. And not in the conventional sense.
It wasn’t even about her physical presence. In fact, as the conviction overtook him, he couldn’t have described any of her features. He couldn’t even see her.
Because it wasn’t about her face or her body.
Ahmare was beautiful to him because of the way she made him feel. She was like a stroke of luck when nothing had been breaking your way or the unexpected relief of a weight that had been crushing you . . . or the rescue boat that appeared just as your head was going under after your very last gasp.
And in response, for the first time in a very long while—maybe ever—he felt something loosen in his gut. It took him a minute to figure out what it was.
Safety. He felt safe with her—and wasn’t that ironic, given that she had a nine-inch hunting knife in her hand. But the thing was, he knew she wasn’t going to come after him, and not just because she needed him to take her to the beloved. Cruelty was just not part of her nature. Like the color of her eyes and the shape of her body, the fact that she was a defender, a peacemaker instead of an aggressor, was an intrinsic part of her.
“I’ll start with the beard.”
It took him a second to figure out what she was talking about. Oh, right. The shave and two bits.
She gathered the growth off his chin at its lowest point. “I’m going to try to be as gentle as I can, okay? Let me know if I hurt you.”
He hadn’t heard that in a while, he thought.
There was a pull, and he tightened the muscles in his neck to keep his head in place. And then she started to slice.
“It’s dull,” she muttered. “Damn it, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. Do what you have to.”
Do what you want to, he added to himself. He kept that quiet, though, because suddenly he wasn’t thinking about the beard, the knife, the shave. He was thinking about other things, other situations.
When he might encourage her. Might ask things of her. Might . . . beg things of her.
His eyes locked on her mouth. Her concentration was such that she had taken her lower lip between her teeth on one side, her sharp canine pressing into the soft pink flesh. Down between his legs, behind the zipper fly of the combat pants, he felt his sex thicken. The response, though natural, seemed a mark of disrespect, but there was no apologizing for it—not without forcing her to acknowledge something that she no doubt would have been put off by.
Unfortunately, there was no cutting off the erection, either. The fact that his cock got strangled by the seam of the pants seemed a fitting punishment, however, and he hoped the discomfort might lead to a deflation, the big guy forced to get back in line—
A sudden release of pressure made his head flip back, and he had to catch himself on the bunk. Glancing down, he measured how much she had taken off of his beard. Six inches. Minimum.
Just think, the very ends of all that had sprouted from his face after his last shave. The one he had done on himself without having any idea that in fifteen minutes he would be struck on the back of his head and then wake up in a living nightmare that would last twenty years.
The one that he had taken special care with because he had wanted to be clean-cut for his mahmen’s Fade ceremony.
He should have known, however, that with her death, his fortunes were going to get worse.
“I was too clouded by grief.”
“What?” Ahmare said as she came back at him with the blade.
There was a tug off to the side as she isolated a section that was closer to his jawline. When that was cut, she moved over a little. And again. Again. Again. Until what she was putting down on the mattress was tufts instead of a single, cohesive length.
“I should have known what my father was going to do,” he heard himself say. “I should have seen it coming. But I was too broken by her passing.” He closed his eyes as he remembered the decline that had led up to the death. “There had been something wrong with her stomach. She had stopped eating about a month before. If she’d been human, I would have said she had the cancer, but in any event, something wasn’t working right and there was no way to get her to a healer. In those last weeks, as she grew weaker and weaker, she didn’t even take from my father when he insisted on offering her his vein. I had been so proud of her because denying him made him insane, but I didn’t know she was sick. I would have chosen the humiliation and impotent rage I always felt when she took from him if it had meant she’d have stayed with me.”
Abruptly, he popped his lids open. “But that’s selfish, right? I mean, to want her to live no matter what it cost us both just so I don’t have to mourn.”
“That’s normal.” The female met his eyes. “It sounds like all you had was each other.”
“I think I wanted her to see me get my revenge. She wouldn’t have liked that, though. She was like you.”
“Me?” Dark brows lifted. “Here, tilt this way.”
He obliged, letting his head fall away from her gentle urging. Then again, he had a feeling if she’d asked him to cut off his own hand, he would have done so—and then made sure to clean her blade off before he returned it to her.
“She was a good soul,” he said. “A kind person. She didn’t want to do harm. Just like you.”
Ahmare laughed in a harsh way. “I spend my nights teaching self-defense. It’s all about punches and kicks, target practice and technique.”
“So innocent people don’t get hurt.”
“I suppose I’ve never thought of it that way.” She eased back and assessed her work. “Other side. And stay really still. I’m getting close to your skin—I wish we had shaving cream to soften things up.”
“There’s running water in that sink. And a bar of soap. Or at least that’s how I left this place when I built it.”
She lowered the blade. “You did all this?”
Duran looked around. “It was part of my grand scheme, and now just a relic to the best laid plans. My mahmen used to help me sneak out of our room. Every time she created a diversion and I went into air ducts, I know she hoped I would escape and never come back. My idea was to get her out, leave her here, and return for her after I was done with killing my father. Not the way any of it went.”
He frowned and focused properly on Ahmare. “You know . . . I never expected to tell anyone all of this.”
“Because it’s private?”
Duran looked away. “Something like that.”