Page 12 of Sheltered in the Storm (The Fortusian Mates # 1)

CHAPTER 11

CALLA

When Vos had started telling his story, I’d prepared myself to hear about a mission during his service to the Silent Guard, or something that had taken place since he finished his twenty years of service.

I’d seen a lot of suffering in my life, and experienced more than my fair share, but nothing at all could have prepared me for this kind of hurt. The pain in Vos’s eyes and the way his voice tightened with grief gutted me. He was so powerful, so deadly, and so fierce, but he’d yearned for a mother.

He didn’t want to cause me anguish of any kind—I knew that as surely as I knew I didn’t want to hurt him. He wanted me to know my hurts and memories would be safe with him. What better way to demonstrate that than sharing what must be one of his deepest, most carefully guarded secrets?

Even so, part of me wanted to pull away, close my eyes, and try to go back to sleep. Just because Vos had revealed something intensely private about himself didn’t mean I had to do the same. And he wouldn’t push. I could stay safely behind my walls if I wanted.

I’d asked him for a second opportunity to see where this might lead, though. He’d taken a chance by accepting, and then an even bigger one by telling me a story so painful that even now his hand trembled in mine. He had to be as full of fear as me, though he might be better at hiding it. I hadn’t promised to stay. He was gambling that I might. It was an enormous risk—more so than I could probably comprehend.

And deep down I knew walls offered protection, but they could be a prison too.

Vos waited quietly while I thought, his chest rising and falling and hearts beating with that soothing rhythm I’d missed so much.

I wanted to wipe the tears off my face, but I didn’t want to let go of his hand. He surprised me by using his free hand and the bedsheet to gently dab the wetness from my cheeks without hurting me by touching my bruises or cuts. That simple and thoughtful kindness meant more to me than I could have explained.

My stomach growled embarrassingly loudly.

“You are hungry,” Vos said, nuzzling my hair. “I am glad your appetite is improving. It is well past midday. Should I prepare a meal?”

“If you don’t mind. I wish I could help with the cooking.” I hesitated. “Well, I’ve never really cooked, but I could help you cook. Hand you things.”

He chuckled. “When you can stand unaided, I would be happy to teach you. In the meantime, I enjoy cooking and I must eat as well. It is not any extra work to cook for two.” He started to rise.

“Can you take me to the sofa?” I asked. “I’d love to sit by the fire, and I like to watch you cook. ”

Vos blinked. “You like to watch me cook?”

My cheeks heated. “Yes.”

“Then it is my privilege to take you to the sofa.” He kissed my forehead and rose from the bed. Carefully, he adjusted my blankets and scooped me up with his tentacles.

As he straightened and I got close enough, I raised my head and kissed him. Which of us was more startled, I wasn’t sure.

The kiss was quick, soft, and very sweet. His lips were hot and tasted a bit like the sea. He returned the kiss as gently as he held me.

I couldn’t hold my head up very long before pain lanced through my neck. When my head fell back to rest on his tentacle, Vos smiled down at me.

“You surprised an assassin,” he murmured. “Quite a feat, my Calla.” His smile vanished, and his expression turned grave. “Calla, I apologize. I misspoke.”

“It’s all right. I don’t mind.” I touched his face. “Soup and toasted bread?”

“Whatever you would like.” He carried me to the front room and arranged me so I lay in pillows on the sofa. “Is this comfortable?”

“Yes.” I grimaced and settled in. “Not as comfortable as your tentacles, but comfortable enough.”

He kissed the top of my head, turned up the fire in the fireplace, and hurried to the kitchen.

Toasty warm in my blankets, I basked in the heat from the fire as he selected frozen kaory meat and homegrown vegetables from the food storage unit. I hadn’t said so, but I enjoyed watching his tentacles roam about the kitchen, picking up utensils and doing small tasks like straightening things as he prepped the food with his human hands. He hummed as he cooked—simple melodies that had become familiar though I didn’t know them. And his tentacles swayed in rhythm .

The truth was, I simply enjoyed watching Vos do anything at all. He was beautiful. His skin shimmered and glowed and his tentacles were a wonder. How would he react if I confessed that to him? Would he laugh? Tease me? Remind me he enjoyed watching over me too?

Everything about this quiet home life was utterly new to me. From the incessant rain to the sounds and smells of cooking to the heavy purple fruit growing on the tree beside the sofa, I might as well have fallen through a rift in space and ended up in a different universe altogether from the one I’d inhabited. Did Vos feel the same?

Through the window, I spotted Poe in the garden contentedly nibbling on a leafy plant as she searched the grass for tiny, slow-moving creatures with shells Vos called enni .

“Why Iosa?” I asked as Vos meticulously sliced the meat and vegetables. “There are lots of other planets and moons that are sparsely populated and have beautiful oceans. Why live here?”

“The answer is not as profound as you might expect.” He smiled over his shoulder, then went back to dicing. “I visited Jakora several times during my time with the Guard. The transports often flew past Iosa on their way to the planet. I believe I was the only passenger who found Iosa beautiful, or even paid it any attention. Long before I thought about where I might go if I survived my years of service, I felt drawn to this moon. And so when I left the Guard, I came here and purchased this home with the thought that I would live here for one year, and if I did not find it to my liking, I would leave.”

“So obviously you like it.” I gazed out the window. “I wish I’d gotten to see Iosa from space the way you did. I might have thought it was beautiful if I hadn’t seen it as my probable grave.”

The rhythm of his chopping missed a beat and his tentacles quivered. I winced. I might have been a little too blunt.

“What about Poe?” I asked, hoping to distract him. “How did you meet Poe? ”

He finished cutting up the soup ingredients and began adding them to the pot. “A few weeks after I settled into this home, I started work on the wall. I was rushing to finish both the wall and the bathroom expansion before the arrival of the rainy season. One morning, as I was laying bricks, Poe emerged from the swamp and approached, limping. One of her legs was fractured, I believe from a fall. She asked for help.”

“Oh, poor Poe,” I said, grimacing. My right leg twinged, as if in sympathy.

Vos seasoned the soup, covered the pot, and left it to simmer while he took out a loaf of bread. “I put a cast on her leg so the bone could heal,” he said, slicing the bread. “And I built her a nest in my home so she did not have to fear predators. In return, she helped me with my wall, and then with my bathroom and other construction. I told her she was welcome to stay once she had healed, and so she did.”

I pictured Vos only weeks or months after leaving the Guard, making his home on an utterly unfamiliar moon he’d only seen in passing. An assassin building a wall one brick at a time, adding onto the little bathroom so he could have an enormous bathtub, crafting a nest for an injured creature with deadly claws and welcoming her into his house.

Making soup from scratch with vegetables he’d grown himself and meat taken from animals he’d hunted. Baking bread and watching Poe in the garden through the kitchen window.

Could this be a life I would want? Would it soothe my hurts like it soothed Vos? Could I grow to love the quiet and even the never-ending rain?

Despite my hunger, the fire’s warmth and Vos’s humming had made me drowsy by the time he brought the tray of food. He set the tray aside, scooped me up, sat on the sofa, and settled me on his lap before he picked up the tray again, resting it on his tentacle .

“Soup and toasted bread, as requested,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “And fresh vinefruit for dessert.”

We ate in companionable silence. The soup was much richer than earlier versions, and more seasoned. Even the kaory meat had a more savory taste. I couldn’t tell if he’d changed how he made the soup or if I felt less pain and that made everything seem better.

The real treat was the vinefruit, which I’d never tried. He’d taken it from the tree next to the sofa, removed the rind, and sliced it neatly onto a plate. The fruit’s flesh was purple and its seeds were plump and white.

“Are the seeds okay to eat?” I asked.

“Yes.” He picked up a slice of fruit. “The fruit is very sweet and the seeds are tart.”

He watched me take a bite, smiling as my eyes widened. “This is delicious,” I said before I chewed. When I bit into the seed, though, its tartness made me grimace.

“I did warn you.” He chuckled. “I suppose it is an acquired taste.”

I ended up eating more of the vinefruit than he did, seeds and all. He rested his chin on top of my head as I ate the last piece. With a towel, he wiped the juice off my hands and his, set the tray aside, and rewrapped my blankets before tucking me against his chest.

I slipped my hand out of the blankets and rested it on my lap. He covered my hand with his much-larger one. Gods, I looked forward to the day I’d healed enough that simply eating and talking didn’t leave me exhausted.

A few quiet minutes later, with a full stomach, warm and secure, I decided to take a chance.

I didn’t really know how to start telling this story, so I said the hardest part first. “Keela was my sister,” I said.

Vos didn’t coo, which surprised me a little, and he didn’t flinch as if he’d had to suppress the urge to do so. Maybe his instincts told him to let me tell my tale how I wanted to tell it, with all the emotions involved.

“I was three and a half when our mother sold us,” I continued. Even with Vos’s tentacles around me, every word felt as difficult to say as climbing up a steep hill. Had Vos felt the same while telling his story? “Keela was a year older than me. We went into different tarjas —training groups—because of our ages. Our tarjas trained in facilities twenty kilometers from each other. I didn’t see her, or have any contact with her, for almost seven years.”

I didn’t need to tell Vos about my training; his was probably not all that different from mine. I was taught to kill. So was he. What else was there to say?

“I fought in the arena for the first time when I was five.” This part wasn’t as bad as talking about Keela. “From ages five to seven, our bouts were not to the death. Winners were declared based on points. You might know that.”

“I do.” His voice was kind. “I know some things about the arenas and fights. Some who completed Guard training became scouts and buying agents for keepers, before the arenas closed. We had access to the information.”

That made it easier to talk about my years in the arena. I wouldn’t have to explain what took place there, or who benefited from our suffering, or what my life had been like.

But talking about Keela wasn’t easy, or anything close to it.

“I didn’t tell anyone I had a sister,” I said. “And I never tried to get a message to her because it would have been intercepted. Some of the highest-grossing bouts and enaras , or fights to the death, were between siblings or combatants who had emotional ties to one another. Enaras between girls who were related drew the biggest crowds and made the most money of all fights, except for the team fights.”

“I did not know that.” Vos’s tentacles caressed me over my blanket cocoon. “You did not want to have to face your sister in the arena.”

“No. And I sure as hells didn’t want all those rich assholes betting and making money on it.” I heard and smelled the arena floor so clearly even now, so many years later. “Every time I saw my name posted on the schedule, I lived in terror that I might see Keela’s name listed as my opponent. And like you, I couldn’t show that fear—not to anyone. The gladiators were encouraged to rat on each other. And the more bouts you won, the more enemies you had, so you had to be very careful at all times. We lived in bunkhouses.”

“So you had no privacy.” He found an uninjured part of my hand and stroked it with his thumb. “Not even at night.”

“No.” I cleared my throat. “I sometimes lay awake wondering what I would do if I were to face Keela in the arena. I couldn’t forfeit and neither could she because that meant a painful public execution. Would I fight to win? Fight to lose? What would she do? And she might not even recognize me. So many questions, so much fear, and I had to hide it.”

He let me stay quiet for a while, stroking my hair as I rested. Talking was tiring, or maybe it was the subject matter that left me feeling so drained.

“By some miracle or twist of fate, we were never opponents or on the same fighting team,” I said softly. My chest ached, but not because of my injuries. “But I saw her twice in the hall before fights—once when I was ten, and again when I was fourteen. And then I never saw her again.”

Vos’s tentacle slipped into my blankets to wrap around my ankle, as if trying to anchor me to the present. He smelled so good, and he was so warm.

“I never saw her name listed as having been killed in the arena,” I added. “It’s very possible I missed it. But it’s also very possible she survived to age sixteen the year before I did, got her collar taken off, and found a way off Ganai. ”

“I hope that is what happened,” Vos said, still stroking the side of my hand with his thumb. “There is no way to know?”

“None at all. The arenas burned. All the records went with them. And it’s impossible to find out who took a transport off the planet.” I took a ragged breath. “You know how you said you used to imagine your mother visiting the training facility and watching you?”

He kissed my hair. “Yes.”

“After her sixteenth birthday passed, I used to imagine Keela was in the crowd watching me fight. I knew she wouldn’t be, because no gladiator ever wanted to watch fights, but I still imagined it. Sometimes I’d look over the crowd to see if she was there, but all the faces were blurry to me.” Bitterness made my stomach churn and my voice harsh. “I hated everyone who came to the fights. I would have burned down the arena with all of them trapped inside if I could have.”

“I do not blame you for that. I imagine many felt the same.”

I swallowed hard. “The day I heard the Alliance and the Barons Guild had forced the arenas to close, I sat in my rented room on Havel Prime and stared out the window, imagining Ganai burning. That was my fantasy, Vos. Not just our keepers and the arena owners dead and the training facilities and arenas burned—a whole planet laid waste. They all let the arenas stay open for so long just because a few people made so much money off them and convinced the people the arenas offered more benefit than harm. I hated everyone for that. I would have lit the fires myself.”

“Your rage is more than understandable.” He rested his cheek on top of my head. “Calla, I am sorry these atrocities happened to you and your sister, and doubly sorry you cannot hold those responsible accountable for their cruelty.”

“Wait—I’m not done,” I said, and now I began to tremble. “When I turned sixteen, after I was free but before I left Ganai, I went back to the town where I was born. I went looking for my mother. I wanted to know why she sold us. I felt so cold and quiet inside when I stepped off the transport. I had never felt so cold in my life. I had a dagger with me and I went looking for answers.”

Vos’s tentacles caressed me again. “I understand.”

“Do you? I don’t know if I do.” My chuckle was dry and humorless. “At the time, I didn’t know what I would do if I found her, or if whatever she said would matter. Nothing would justify what she’d done. But she was gone. When I got to my hometown, I discovered she’d died years earlier in a transport crash. So I never got to find out what I would have done if I’d found her. I just get to wonder. And I don’t know if that dagger would have stayed in its sheath or not.”

“I had a moment not so different from this, during my final mission for the Guard.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I too cannot say what I would have done had the choice not been taken out of my hands. I find myself standing at that crossroads again and again in my dreams and in my imagination. Sometimes I make one choice, sometimes another. I believe I know which was the correct choice, the one I should have made, but then I reconsider and wonder if my fear of the repercussions would have won out. Like you, I do not know.”

“What does it say about us that we don’t know?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we know what’s right and what’s wrong?”

“I am not sure.” Vos moved so he could look into my eyes. His expression was thoughtful. “I do not know if it says anything definitive about us at all that we are unsure. But I think we yearn to have been able to make that choice rather than have it taken away from us. Perhaps we are haunted by the fact we did not get to choose.”

I found myself unable to get a breath.

We did not get to choose .

All my life, until the day I took off my collar, I had not gotten to choose. I had traveled to my hometown wanting to know why I’d deserved that fate, only to discover that once again fate, or the gods, or happenstance, had taken away my ability to choose. I’d wanted control over one thing that day and been denied. I’d returned to the port consumed by anger and helplessness.

Right behind that realization was another: When my fighter was falling toward Iosa’s surface, I’d had a moment of helplessness before I coached myself back to defiance and remembered I had the choice to fight. I’d probably survived only because I’d fought to the last to control my landing.

I might not have ended up on Iosa by choice, and be hurting and not much use while I healed, but I had the ability to choose what I did or didn’t do. I also believed my ability to make choices for myself was every bit as important to Vos as it was to me. The thought was deeply empowering, and deeply comforting.

“Calla,” Vos said, tipping my chin up so gently. “Tell me what you are thinking.”

I was thinking about his lips, only centimeters from my own, and the way his eyes glowed like starlight.

“I think you’re right,” I said instead. “About not getting to decide haunting us. I think that makes more sense to me than just about anything else I’ve ever heard.”

“So you do not regret sharing this story with me?” His gaze searched my face. “Or that I shared mine with you?”

I’d expected to feel more vulnerable now that he knew one of my most closely guarded secrets, but I didn’t. He’d listened to every word—really listened and not just heard. I’d never felt like he’d judged me for my thoughts or actions. Empathy without pity was wonderfully comforting.

Was this kindness and comfort a result of him believing I was his true mate, or was this simply who Vos was? Was there a difference?

No, wait—he’d taken Poe in without a hesitation, healed her injury, and treasured her as a companion and friend. That had nothing at all to do with true mate physiology and everything to do with kindness and empathy.

“Calla?” Vos prompted, jolting me out of my thoughts.

“No, I don’t regret this conversation,” I assured him. “As much as it hurt, I’m grateful for it.”

“I am grateful too, and humbled by your trust in me.” He frowned. “Does your stomach hurt?”

I’d wrapped both arms across my abdomen without realizing it. “It aches all the time,” I admitted. “It’s worse than usual right now because I’ve been sitting up for a while. But I want to stay out here instead of going back to bed.”

He rearranged the pillows on the sofa so he could recline and then moved me very carefully so I was lying against his chest. The discomfort in my stomach began to ease.

“Thank you,” I said with a sigh. “That’s lovely. But don’t let me keep you from doing things you need to take care of.”

“Nothing needs my immediate attention but you,” he promised, his lips against my forehead. “We can rest…my Calla.”

He said it tentatively, though I’d told him I didn’t mind being called his Calla. No fear rose when he said it, and I didn’t resent it like I’d thought I would. But why?

Maybe because I’d begun to accept that behind the possessive my was a man who believed deeply in the importance of having choices. His tentacle around my ankle was gentle and never tight. He held me, but he would let me go if I asked.

Maybe no one valued body autonomy and choice like those who’d had neither for a very long time, and would never take those privileges for granted as long as they lived.

“May I have a kiss?” I asked.

Vos’s breathing hitched. “Yes. Thank you for asking, but from now on, you do not need to ask.” He drew me higher on his chest, bent his head, and kissed me.

This kiss was a little less gentle and a little hungrier than the first, but no less sweet. And the kiss lingered for several long moments before he raised his head.

“I love your eyes,” I murmured, my fingertips brushing his lower lip. “They’re like starlight.”

“And to me, you are the sun.” He settled me back in his arms and tentacles and tucked my head under his chin. “Rest now, my Calla.” Softly, he cooed.

All my aches faded away, and I slept.