Chapter 4 - First Contact

The first drop hits my cheek like a flicked coin. I almost miss it. I'm crouched over a dead man with two fingers pressed to his pulse, confirming what I already know, and the water lands warm on my skin and I go still and look up.

The canvas above me trembles. Then another drop.

The sky opens and dumps everything it has.

Not the slow kind. The summer kind, no warning, no apology, total. Warm rain hitting so hard it sounds like gravel on leather. The nearest bonfire dies in three seconds, orange to black, and the smoke that billows up smells like wet char and something chemical. Then the bonfire two rows over. Then the one past the east lane. The camp swallows its own light, and somewhere out there in the dark, Almartín is still killing, still adding to a number I can feel like a debt I didn't sign.

Men shout. The ordinary annoyance of men who wanted to stay drunk and dry. The fiddle music stops mid-note. Tent flaps slap open, hands reach out, grab at things left outside. Then the flaps drop shut. In sixty seconds the inner lanes are empty.

The mud comes fast. I step back from the body and my boot sinks to the ankle. It pulls when I lift it, wet and sucking. I wipe the blood from my fingers on his coat because there is no point being precious about a dead man's clothes, and I take stock.

Six tents south of where I cut in. Kill count at fourteen. Fourteen kills, past the Alcalde's floor, and I don't know what number Almartín is sitting at but I know it's higher. That knowledge sits between my back teeth like a stone I keep running my tongue over. Ten kills of money I can't afford to lose.

The rain drums the canvas above me in waves, gusting, not steady. Good. Nobody inside any of these tents will hear anything over this, which means I can close the gap, which means mamá stays off the ship.

My hand presses flat against my stomach. I don't know I'm doing it until I feel the warmth of my own skin and the cool bar of the belly ring under my palm. I pull my hand away.

I move.

The problem with the rain, beyond the mud, is that the lanes between tents go dark between one breath and the next. I had the brazier glow to navigate by before. Now I have nothing except the occasional bleed of orange light through canvas walls where the men inside haven't banked their coals yet. I move tent to tent, shoulder sliding along canvas, and after the third lane I lose my bearings entirely. I memorized the camp's layout from the Alcalde's map. Maps don't account for rain.

I find a canvas wall with a seam running top to bottom, an interior divider, and I press my palm flat against it and listen. I hear breathing, close-packed. Three, maybe four men on the other side, all of them deeply asleep. I memorize the tent shape, find the back corner, and cut a slit six inches long with my shortest blade. It opens on a gap between this tent and the next.

The gap is eighteen inches wide, at most. I step into it sideways.

Almartín is already there.

My knife comes up and his hand closes around my wrist in the dark, finding it the way you find something you already knew was coming. The tension in his grip is specific: stopped himself. His breath hits my face, warm, close, and my body prices the proximity before my brain can shut the register.

"East side," he murmurs.

"West," I say back.

We're both wrong. The rain collapsed our grid.

The patrol sound reaches us a half-second later. Boots in mud, rhythmic, disciplined, the only disciplined thing in this whole drunk camp. Two men at least. A night patrol that survived the downpour by virtue of having somewhere to go. The lane they're walking is the one on the other side of the tent at my back.

Almartín doesn't speak. Neither do I.

He pivots me. His hands find my shoulders and turn me around, my back pressed against his chest, and he walks us both into the corner where the two tent walls form an angle. His arm comes across my collarbone, pinning me still. His other hand rests loose at my waist, fingers warm against the strip of bare skin above my shorts. I can't see his face. I can feel his breath against the side of my neck, steady and even, and his chest rising and falling behind me like a wall I didn't ask to lean on.

I hear the patrol's boots slow. One of them sniffs the air like a dog, looking for something wrong and coming up empty. The rain covers everything: our breath, the mud sucking at our boots, the half-open slit two feet to our left.

I don't move. Can't. He's got me locked against him with the patrol right there and every second I spend in this corner is a second I'm not killing, which is a second mamá can't afford.

His hand moves.

Slow. Unhurried. His fingers slide down from my collarbone, tracing the strap of my leather top, following it down to where the leather cups my breast. He runs his fingertips along the edge, following the line where leather meets bare skin, and I feel his breath change against my neck when he finds the gap where the fabric rides loose.

His hand slips under the leather. His palm is rough, callused, hot against rain-cooled skin. He cups my breast, holding without gripping, his thumb brushing slow and deliberate across my nipple, and I feel his mouth curve against the side of my neck because the bastard knows. He knows I can't make a sound until the patrol clears, and he is enjoying this, and I want to break every finger on that hand and I don't move a single muscle to stop him. I could. I have a dagger. All I have to do is slide it back and he bleeds. I don't slide it back. I am choosing not to slide it back and I am not going to examine that too closely right now.

My nipple hardens under his thumb. I didn't authorize that. My breath catches in my throat and I swallow it down and keep my eyes on the visible slice of lane to my left because if I close my eyes this becomes something I'm participating in instead of something that's happening to me.

Then I feel the rest of him.

He's pressed against my back from shoulder to hip, and what I feel against the base of my spine through the leather of his trousers is not subtle. He is hard. Has been, probably, since he turned me into this corner. The knowledge lands low in my stomach and does something I resent entirely, a pull between my legs that has nothing to do with the job and everything to do with the solid length of him pressed against me while his thumb circles my nipple in the dark.

I breathe through it. Slow. Measured. The patrol is still there; I can hear the shorter one saying something low and indistinct. I breathe through what his hand is doing to my breast and through what his cock is doing to the base of my spine and I keep my lungs steady. My pulse is a different story. Fast. Stupid. Running like I'm sprinting when I'm standing still, pinned against a man I'm supposed to be outworking, and every heartbeat is wasted time. I should be counting, calculating. Fourteen kills at six thousand divided by a camp of two hundred means I need to move, I need to stop letting his callused thumb draw circles on me like I'm something to be savored.

His thumb circles again. Slower this time, pressing, rolling the stiff peak under his rough skin. His breath is warm on my ear. He is taking his time because he can, because I am pinned against him with a patrol eight feet away and his hand inside my leather and his cock a solid pressure against me, and there is nothing I can do about any of it except stand here and not make a sound and pretend that my blood isn't running south.

My back arches. A bare inch. I press into both: his palm cupping my breast in front, his hardness behind. I didn't decide to do that. My body made the decision without consulting me and the betrayal is so complete that I feel my face flush hot even in the rain.

The patrol moves on. Boots receding. The mud sounds fade to nothing.

Neither of us moves.

His hand is still under the leather, his arm still across my collarbone, and I have not moved because if I move I have to acknowledge what is happening, and I am not ready to give him that.

Ten seconds. Fifteen.

His thumb draws one more slow circle and I breathe out through my nose and the sound that comes out is not controlled. Low, tight, barely there, but I didn't mean to make it, and I feel his grin widen against my neck like he won something he's been pricing all night.

My hand moves.

I reach behind me. I don't think about it. My hand is at the front of his trousers before I've decided to put it there, and I feel the shape of him through the leather, thick and straining, and he goes still. The grin dissolves. His breath stutters against my ear, once, and that stutter is worth more than it should be. My fingers find his belt. The buckle is worn brass, simple, and I start working it open because apparently that is what we are doing now, in a gap between tents in a flooded marauder camp, and I am furious at myself and doing it anyway because my body has mutinied and my brain can't outbid the wanting.

The leather gives. The buckle loosens. My fingers find the laces beneath, and I work them open with clumsy, furious precision, rain running down my wrist and into my palm. The fabric parts. Heat hits my hand first, then skin, bare and hard and thicker than I expected, and his breath catches against my ear hard enough to feel. I wrap my hand around him. Once. To know it. To feel the weight and heat of him in my palm, the way his whole body locks around that single point of contact. I stroke him once, short and tight, and his hips jerk forward into my hand before he stops himself. I hate how much I like that.

A sound.

Close enough to matter. Boots again, a different rhythm, two men or three, coming from the south lane we crossed twenty minutes ago. A second patrol, or the first one doubling back on a different route.

Both of us go absolutely still.

The boots slow. Stop. One of them says something, too low to make out. Then they move again, parallel, closing on our lane.

I pull my hand back. The buckle is still undone, the laces hanging open.

He releases me. His hand slides out from under the leather, his fingertips trailing across my ribs, dragging across my stomach, and then his arms drop and he steps back and I'm standing in the corner with the rain drumming down and my back suddenly cold where his chest was and his belt still hanging open and nothing finished.

Heart loud. Hands shaking. Coño.

I'm going to kill him, slit his throat in his sleep and collect the full contract and walk out of this valley with every coin the Alcalde promised, because mamá does not have another month and every coin matters, every single one. Half of six thousand is three thousand. Three thousand does not buy mamá off that ship. That's the price of standing in this corner with my hands shaking and my nipples still hard and his belt still undone. That is the cost. I'll forget his hands. Forget the way his breath stuttered when I touched him, the weight and heat of him in my palm, and the grin, and the sound I made that I didn't choose to make. Que se joda. Him and his twenty-four kills and his scarred fingers and the unfinished thing between us that my body is still screaming to complete.

I step sideways out from the corner. My boot sinks into the mud and I pull it free, and I take two steps back toward the lane and stop because the lane is dark and I need a second and I do not like needing a second. My fingers find the belly ring. The pearl is slick with rain. I hold it for one breath, two. Then I let go.

He steps up beside me, shoulder close enough to touch.

"Fourteen," I say. It comes out flat. Good.

A pause. "Twenty-four."

That is not a gap I close in one downpour. That is ten kills, ten bodies I didn't drop. Ten increments of mamá's freedom sitting in his pouch instead of mine. The number settles behind my back teeth next to all the other stones.

"Liar," I say, because I am not going to give him the satisfaction of believing him outright.

"Check my pouch."

"I'm not touching your pouch."

"You had your hand on my..." He stops. In the dark I can't see his face but I can feel the shape of what he isn't finishing, and the corner of my mouth does something involuntary. I kill it before it becomes a smile. Smiles are free and I can't afford free.

"We've drifted," I say. "The grid's gone."

"Rain does that."

"We need to reorient."

A pause, shorter than the last one. "Together or separate?"

The rain drums down. Warm and total, soaking through my collar, running into my eyes. I wipe my face with the back of my wrist and the motion buys me two seconds I don't strictly need except that I do, because I can still feel his hand on my breast and his cock against my spine and the place where his fingertips dragged across my stomach, and my hands are still shaking and I am furious about every part of it.

Three thousand gold. Half. That is the number he is offering when he says together. Half the contract is not enough. Half means mamá boards that ship in chains anyway, and I have been running these numbers since I was sixteen.

"Same area," I say. "Separate."

"Not bad," he says.

It shouldn't land. It always lands. I price the landing at zero and my chest tightens anyway.

I move. East, or what I think is east. Fingers trailing canvas. I don't look back. Something got past the discipline and the count. I didn't let it in. It got in anyway, and now it's in the ledger, and I don't know what column to put it in.

I find the next tent, find the seam, draw my blade.

Mamá. Six weeks. Six thousand gold. Every kill from here to dawn is hers.

I get back to work.

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