Page 22 of Remmen

I let myself believe him, standing there bleeding, because I wanted her off that ranch more than I wanted the truth.

“Get in the truck,” I told Anne. “You’re coming with me. Now.”

She didn’t move. “I’ve got Maisie’s buggy⁠—”

“Leave it. Korfas can fetch it tomorrow, in daylight, with men.” I was already steering her toward the truck with a hand flat on her back, doing the exact thing the mayor of this town had no business doing to this woman in front of witnesses, and I couldn’t stop. There was a hurt, starved, killing animal loose in the scrub between this ranch and my town, and she was not driving through it alone in a tin box built for one. She dug in, and I heard my voice drop. “Please. Anne.”

She picked up her kit. She wrapped my forearm where I stood, fast and furious about it, and then she got in my truck.

Whatever trust she’d earned with those men, I’d torn it down in one afternoon. And right that moment, I couldn’t give a single damn.

CHAPTER 9

ANNE

I didn’t need to be an expert on the meteorology of Ceres-9 to know a storm cloud when I saw one. And if nature was going to give out heavy-handed metaphors of my life, it might as well include some rain.

Remmen was pissed. I didn’t know he had it in him. His fingers curled around the steering wheel and he didn’t look at me, eyes too focused on the road ahead and racing the storm home.

No, that was a lie. I knew very well that he had anger in him. How could he not when his life had started out in nothing but violence and fear? But I hadn’t known he could be angry at me.

Did you think you were special?

I hated the sound of that little voice in my head.

“Are you hurt?” I asked. The silence in the truck might kill me if it went on for much longer. I stared at his forearms, this time in a completely medical capacity and had to suppress a gasp. “Shit, you are. You’re bleeding. Pull over right now.”

“It’s fine.”

“It is not fine. That wrap I did in the yard is soaked through. You’ve popped it open again driving, because you drive like you’re mad at the truck.” I twisted in the seat to get a real look. Blood had run down past his wrist and dried in the creases of his knuckles, and there was fresh red welling up under the edge of the dressing. “Pull over.”

“We’re nearly there.”

“You’re bleeding all over the place. Pull. Over.”

He kept driving. And then the sky opened up like somebody’d cut the bottom out of it.

I’d seen rain. The weather on Perren was a personality disorder. I had never seen anything come down like Ceres-9 came down. It hit the windshield in one solid sheet and the road just stopped existing. Remmen said a word I didn’t know in a voice I did, took his foot off the accelerator, and the truck rolled to a crawl and then to nothing, because there was nowhere left to go. You couldn’t see the front of the hood.

He cut the engine. The rain came down on the roof like gravel.

“There,” I said. “The universe agreed that you needed to pull over.”

He huffed. It wasn’t a laugh, but it was in the family.

A minotaur truck was built for a minotaur. From outside it looked big enough to hold a small marching band. From the inside, with one seven-foot male taking up his whole seat and half of mine, it held about half what you’d expect. And now the rain had turned the windows to gray static and shrunk the whole world down to the space between us.

I did the sensible thing and thought about his arm.

“Give it here.” I dug the kit up off the floor by my feet. “Turn the cab light on. And hold still, or I swear.”

He turned the light on. He shifted around to face me as much as the seat let him. His knee ended up against my thigh, one horn nearly took out the little lamp, and he laid his forearm across the gap between us, palm up, like an offering.

I peeled the ruined wrap off.

It was bad, but not as bad as it looked. The claws had raked him above the wrist, three ragged lines, none of them deep. The yard-wrap had held the worst of it, but he’d worked it loose being an idiot with the wheel, and the top of it had opened. I got the light where I wanted it and got my fingers on either side of the worst line to see how deep, and that was when I noticed he’d stopped breathing.

Not a hitch. He just stopped. A male the size of a doorframe, gone to stone the moment I touched him.