Page 20 of Flesh & Divinity
She sets the cloth down. “There were four of them today. I haven’t seen anyone else on this island for a month. Suddenly a horn blares and then boom, four men appear.”
“Your point?”
“That horn means something.” She crosses her arms. “What is it?”
Jaq looks up.
“Enough,” he says.
She holds his gaze. “That’s not an answer.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
She is making a calculation behind those pale blue eyes. Cataloguing, measuring, filing information away for the moment she needs it.
It is no longer only what we want from her.
That thought arrives with the particular quiet of something I am not going to be able to ignore much longer.
“Tell me,” she says.
Gus laughs, it’s short, harsh, not entirely unkind. “You hit a scavenger with a chain and suddenly think you are entitled to information?”
“And he’s still on the ground.” She doesn’t raise her voice.
The kitchen goes very still.
Jaq growls. He studies her for a long moment in the way that means he is recalibrating, adjusting the weight he gives to something, shifting it from one column to another in that precise internal ledger of his. Whatever he finds in her face is not what he expected to find.
“Sit down,” he says. “We’ll talk about the scavengers.”
She sits.
The look that moves across her face for half a second before she controls it, isn’t triumph. It’s something quieter, something that looks devastatingly close to relief at being included rather than managed and the sight of it does something to my chest that I file away for later.
“The horn signifies a new arrival.” Her eyes widen. “Someone else was delivered to the island.”
“Why do you seem worried about that?”
“There has never been two deliveries within a month of each other in the two years since we have been here.” Jaq says no more and stands. The air in the kitchen shifts with him the way it always does when he decides he is done talking and has moved on to something else entirely. He crosses to her without a word. She tips her chin up on instinct, which tells me everything about how well she’s learned to read him.
His hand finds her throat, not a grip, just a presence, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw. “You listen,” he says. “You don’t run. You don’t continue to snoop through our home. Do as we say. Don’t fuck this up, Cinder Soot.” She cringes. “Understood?”
Her eyes are dark and her breathing has changed. I know that look. I know every version of that look.
“And if I don’t?” she asks because she can never help herself.
He tips her head back further. “Then I tie you to the bed and you remain there until I decide if you escape this rock with us or not.” His voice drops to something low and unhurried. “Before I decide, I’ll spend the night before we flee making sure you regret every second of lying.”
The sound she makes is involuntary and small. She hates herself for it. I can tell from the way color floods her face.
“Understood,” she says.
“Good girl.”
Her thighs press together beneath the table. I look away before I do something about it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
