Page 64 of Silver Slayer

“Thirty-one is not old, Brooke.” Erin shrugged. “Besides, we aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

“True that.Shall we?” Brooke swept her arm forward in an exaggerated bow, gesturing toward the cookery.

We fell in behind a loose cluster of Valosian males heading the same direction, their broad shoulders filling the corridor ahead of us, voices trading back and forth in light conversation. The palace was inviting in a way the ship never had been, not recycled air and humming panels, but a place that felt structural, like the stone itself held heat.

The rich aroma found us well before the cookery did. Slow-cooked and deeply savory, the kind of scent that registerssomewhere older than hunger. My stomach made a sound that was less a grumble than a declaration of intent.

The cookery was huge and only about half-full. Long tables ran the length of the room in neat rows; benches were occupied by a mix of silver-scaled males and women in kilt-dresses, their voices overlapping into a warm, communal din.

Food came from the far end. Some kind of stew ladled from an enormous vessel into deep bowls, with sporks laid out beside them. The smell was extraordinary.

I scanned the room for Vennox before I'd made the conscious decision to look. He wasn't there, but I already knew that. The thread that had burned so bright on the ship was now thin and faraway, carrying the faint hum of his presence from somewhere that wasn't here.

Brooke didn't even try to be subtle about her own search.

"Looking for someone?" Erin asked dryly, as we joined the queue behind two Huren warriors.

"You already know the answer to that," Brooke said, blue eyes methodically working the room section by section with the focused efficiency of a woman who knew exactly what she was looking for and intended to find it.

She found Truxxet before the queue moved three steps. I followed her gaze to a table near the far wall, where he sat alone, an untouched bowl of stew in front of him, head bent over it, one hand stirring with a spork, showing no apparent interest in eating. His absent stare was the faraway look of a male with something on his mind and no one to say it to.

"Excuse me," Brooke murmured, already stepping out of the line.

"And then there were two," Erin said. “Whatever they’re serving, it smells delish.”

A low, graveled baritone rumbled from directly behind us. "It's elksen stew."

We turned.

The male standing there was built like a mountain, all corded muscle and sheer mass, draped in the fur trousers and heavy boots of Clan Jurigon. His silver scales caught the cookery's light with the luminescence of a male in his prime, and his silver-white hair fell in a straight, heavy curtain that brushed the waistband of his trousers. His eyes were more white than silver, pale and steady and uncompromising — and they were locked entirely on Erin.

He made her look almost fragile by comparison, his shoulders broad enough to block out the light behind him. He didn't so much as glance in my direction. His attention was a physical thing, a weight, an offer. And the way he looked at her suggested the elksen stew was the second most interesting thing on the menu.

Erin, who dispatched emergency services for a living and had kept her composure through eight weeks of things actively trying to kill us, reached up and touched the neckline of her kilt-dress. Then her hair. Then smiled up at him from beneath her lashes with a girlish expression I had never once seen on her face in all the weeks I had known her.

"Well," she said, "it smells wonderful. This is our first time trying any Valosian food. We have only just arrived. I’m Erin, by the way."

She offered her hand. He stared at it for a heartbeat with clearly no concept of a handshake, then took it in both of his, dwarfing it entirely, and turned it palm up with a gentleness that belied his size. His thumb found the pulse point at her wrist and moved across it in a slow, deliberate stroke.

Whatever was left of Erin's composure melted straight down to his booted feet, her body angling toward his.

"I am Vorrax of Clan Jurigon," he said, his smoldering gaze never leaving hers.

“And then there was one,” I muttered and took a step forward away from the vortex of newfound lust.

I collected my bowl and spork and stood at the edge of the room, doing a quiet sweep of the faces at the long tables the way you do on the first day at a new school, looking for a face that might mean you don't have to eat alone.

I was genuinely happy for them. Brooke had found her Trisess warrior, and Erin had barely stepped foot in the cookery before a mountain of a Jurigon male had decided she was worth his full attention. After everything we'd been through, they deserved some happiness.

The envy was small and quiet and entirely my own fault. It wasn't that I wanted what they had; it was that they had made letting go of the only life we had ever known look so easy. And here I was, standing at the edge of a cookery on an alien planet with a glowing mark on my chest and a warrior somewhere inthis city who had given me a piece of himself and would have given me all of him, if only I'd let him.

Then a hand shot up on the far side of the room, waving.

Marie. Seated with a small group of women, she gestured at the open space on the bench beside her with the impatient confidence of someone who had already decided you were sitting there and was just waiting for you to arrive at the same conclusion.

I waved back and crossed the room.

Chapter Twenty-Three