Page 33 of Dark Chains: First Link
Something shifted in his expression at the mention of her son. A slight softening. As if he cared. As if he knew what Tomek meant to her. He'd seen her son that day when he'd come with the otherstrange soldiers. She'd been terrified that they had come for her son, but Yaaf had told her that they weren't there to take anyone.
When he started walking toward her, her body tensed involuntarily. The response was so deeply ingrained that it operated below the level of conscious control. A man was approaching her. He was bigger and stronger than she was. Every encounter she'd had with males had reinforced the same neural pathway. Men meant danger, pain, violation.
But Yaaf didn't come at her the way those men had come, with the presumptive ownership of someone who had been given access to a body and intended to use it.
He walked to where she was crouching in the dirt and crouched right next to her in the soil, with the okra.
Her heart rate doubled, and the bravado that had allowed her to smile and call him by name evaporated like dew in the morning heat. Having him so close to her was very different from looking at him from a distance. Over there, he had been a memory she could manage. Over here, he was a physical presence that overwhelmed her senses. He smelled like soap and motor oil, and he was so big that he sucked in all the air around her even though they were out in the open.
"What are you doing?" she asked in a shaky voice.
"Helping." He reached for an okra pod, examined it the way she had been examining them, testing its length and firmness with his fingers. Then he snapped it cleanly from the stem and placed it in her basket.
Had he been watching her technique before making his presence known?
She stared at him. An immortal warrior was crouching in the dirt with her and picking okra.
"What I meant," he said, snapping another pod and dropping it in her basket, "is that you still look like the girl I knew. But you are all grown up now."
He smiled at her, and the smile was so unexpected that her brain needed a moment to process it. There was nothing seductive in the expression. Nothing predatory. No hidden agenda behind the curve of his mouth. He was just being friendly, smiling at her the way Burda might smile if the occasion called for it.
It was disarming.
She felt something loosen in her chest. It wasn't complete relaxation because that would have been stupid based on just one friendly smile, but it was enough that the rigid tension in her shoulders dropped by a fraction and her fingers loosened their grip on the stalk she'd practically destroyed.
"Nice save, but you still haven't told me what you're doing here," she said.
"I told you. I'm inspecting."
She arched a brow. "The vegetable garden?"
"Yes." He picked up another okra pod, held it to his eye like a jeweler examining a gem, and set it down with exaggerated care. "I need to make sure you're not growing anything poisonous in here. Hemlock. Nightshade. Weapons-grade chili peppers."
The laugh that came out of her was unguarded and loud. Feyla's head snapped up at the sound, and Mahra stopped weeding and stared.
"Weapons-grade chili peppers?" she repeated, and the absurdity of the phrase coming out of the mouth of an immortal warrior was so like Yaaf that the years between thirteen and nineteen melted away.
In that moment, he wasn't a dangerous stranger in a uniform. He was her old friend.
"I'm happy to see that you haven't lost your sense of humor," she said. "I was afraid that they'd beaten it out of you."
The smile vanished.
It didn't fade or diminish. It was there, and then it was not, like a light switched off. His face returned to the hard, closed expression that turned his features from handsome to forbidding and made him look like exactly what he was, a soldier who had been forged in a place designed to eliminate everything human.
"They did," he said.
Two words. Flat, quiet, delivered without self-pity or drama, which made them worse than if he'd said them with emotion. They were a statement of fact, the way someone might say the day was hot or the soil was dry. A truth that required no elaboration because the evidence was sitting right in front of her.
The silence that followed was loaded with everything those two words contained. Six years of training camp. The violence that had turned a boy into a killer.
They'd beaten the humor out of him. They'd beaten the kindness out of him. They'd beaten out her friend.
And yet, ten seconds ago, he'd made her laugh.
"I'm sorry," she said, because she didn't know what else to say.
He lifted his eyes to her, and the closed expression opened just enough to let something through. A hint of warmth. "Don't be. It was done, and it made me who I am now."
