Page 38 of Salt in the Wound

The door closes behind him with a soft click, and Indrie stands in the corridor and breathes, and tries not to think about the warmth he's leaving behind.

Chapter 16

Bohdi finds him at the helm, staring daggers at the horizon, doing his damndest to deal with the war inside him.

The storm has passed. It moved through in the early hours of the morning, the clouds thinning and breaking apart until the dawn came through in ragged strips of gold, and the sea settled from its fury into a long, rolling calm that rocks the ship in slow, easy swells. The damage is manageable, the broken railing, the lost cargo, some torn rigging that the sailmaker is already working on. His crew is intact. No one else went overboard. No one else came close.

Eskil stands at the wheel with his hands locked on the spokes and his jaw locked on its hinges and stares at the clean, empty line where the sea meets the sky and tries to get a grip on himself.

Half of him is twisted and unmade by the memory of Indrie naked in his bed. Long hair falling around slim shoulders, tangled and salt-stiff and dark against the white of the pillow. The sheet pooled at his waist, pale skin exposed in the lamplight, the flush that had spread from his cheeks down his neck andacross his chest when he realized where he was and what he wasn't wearing. Those dark eyes, wide and startled and so impossibly beautiful that Eskil had nearly lost his composure right there, had nearly reached out and touched and taken and ruined everything.

And before that, during the night, in the dark, with the storm howling outside and Indrie's unconscious body pressed against his, the slow torture of skin on skin. The feeling of Indrie warming under his hands, the cold receding inch by inch, replaced by a heat that was partly Eskil's doing and partly Indrie's own body coming back to life. How the younger man had shifted in his sleep, pressing back into Eskil's chest with an instinctive, unconscious seeking that had driven Eskil halfway to madness. The sounds he'd made, small, soft, wordless, that had no right to be as devastating as they were. And Eskil's cock, hard and insistent against the small of Indrie's back for what felt like hours, a constant, maddening reminder that the body he was saving was also the body he wanted.

He hadn't slept. He'd told himself he had, but what he'd actually done was lie there with his eyes closed and every nerve ending on fire, holding perfectly still, using every technique he'd ever learned for controlling his body in combat to keep from moving. From pressing forward. From letting his hands drift from the safe territory of Indrie's arms and chest to the places they wanted to go. He'd counted breaths. Counted heartbeats. Counted the planks in the ceiling. He'd recited the names of every settlement in Rengara in alphabetical order, twice, and it hadn't helped at all.

Half of him hasn't left that bed, is still there in the dark with the feeling of it, with the knowledge that he now knows what Indrie's skin feels like against his and he will never, as long as he lives, be able to unknow it.

The other half is incensed at the idea that the younger man has seen him as his owner this entire time.

They gave me to you. To serve you.

The words repeat in Eskil's head on a loop, each repetition carrying a fresh surge of fury that has nowhere to go. The words and how Indrie had said them, quietly, without inflection, stating an obvious and unremarkable fact. The sky is blue. Water is wet. I belong to you. Said with the same resigned certainty he'd use to describe the weather, because to Indrie it is the weather. It's the unchanging condition of his existence: he is owned. He has always been owned. The face of the owner changes but the fundamental reality does not.

And Eskil, standing there in his cabin with his shirt half-on and his chest bare and the younger man naked and flushed in his bed, had seen the shape of the last two weeks redraw itself in an instant. Every interaction. Every careful glance. Every flinch and every tentative smile and every moment where Indrie had done exactly as he was told without question or complaint.

Eskil had thought he was watching a man adjust to a new environment. He'd thought the compliance was gratitude, or at least acceptance. He'd thought the careful deference was respect, earned through the crew's kindness and Dagny's friendship and the small, deliberate gestures Eskil had made to show he was not Armond.

But it wasn't any of those things. It was obedience. The practiced, survival-driven obedience of a slave who has learned that compliance is the only thing between him and the next blow.

Every smile Indrie had given him. Every meal he'd delivered to Eskil's cabin. Every word he'd learned in Eskil's language. Every moment he'd stood in Eskil's presence, careful and quiet and unflinching, all of it was performance. Survival. Not because he wanted to. Because he believed he had to.

The thought makes Eskil's skin crawl.

He grips the wheel tighter and the wood groans in his hands and the horizon doesn't flinch.

"You're going to break the wheel."

Bohdi leans against the mast, arms crossed, red hair catching the early light. He looks tired, he'd spent most of the storm at the helm after Eskil went overboard, fighting the sea alone until the worst had passed and the night watch could relieve him. There are shadows under his eyes and a tightness around his mouth that he's making no effort to hide.

"I'll buy a new one," Eskil says, without looking at him.

"With what? Our vast Kalkoan fortune?" Bohdi pushes off the mast and comes to stand beside him, and the silence between them is the particular silence of two men who have known each other long enough that the silence itself is a conversation. Bohdi lets it sit for exactly as long as Eskil needs, and then says, "How's our charge faring?"

Eskil grits his teeth so hard his jaw aches. Bohdi notices. Bohdi always notices. His eyes narrow fractionally, the shift from casual to attentive so subtle that anyone else would miss it.

Eskil tells him. He gets the words out quickly, with minimal preamble, because dragging it out only makes it worse. "The boy thinks he's my slave."

Bohdi's eyebrows rise. Not dramatically, Bohdi is too controlled for dramatic, but enough to communicate genuine surprise. "How did you possibly get into that topic?"

Eskil looks at him. Really looks at him. And says, through his teeth, "He implied he wasn't worth saving."

The words hang between them. Bohdi's expression shifts, the surprise draining into something quieter and harder. Controlled anger. Two weeks of watching Indrie have made him fond despite his best efforts at professional distance.

Bohdi crosses his arms. "This is the healer who kept a terminally ill man alive for half a decade."

"Yes."

"The one who set two sprained ankles, broke a fever, taught a man to read, and reorganized Gunnar's galley in under two weeks."