I listen as Mallory tells her story, and I’m filled with pride at how composed she is, considering everything she’s been through. At how well she expresses herself, even when her hands shake and tears fill her eyes. I already know most of what she’s telling them—how she wound up being rented out on Station Alpha and on the blimp, until it crashed—but it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time.

I want to give her another story to tell. A boring one, where nothing ever happens except that she gets laid—by choice, by me—and chases fucking rabbits through a field, beneath a bright blue sky. She deserves a life like that. A life where people like Varian and like Gerald and Phoebe Gregory don’t exist.

A life where no one tries to kill her in her sleep.

Maybe someday, I can give her that. After I’ve ended Varian. Surely that will stop the nightmares. That unfinished business still haunting me in my sleep.

When she finishes her story, her friends surround her again, sharing more hugs and tears, and for just a second, the scene in front of me blurs. In that instant, I’m no longer here, on the Red Rock. I’m back on Kallisto, watching from the doorway as another cluster of women hug each other and blot happy tears. They’re wearing dresses in soft colors, rather than cut-off prison-issue pants and tees, and when their huddle finally breaks up, I see her. The woman at the center of all this fuss.

Norah.

I wasn’t supposed to be at her wedding shower. They’re for women only. But I couldn’t miss a chance to see her so happy.

She died four months later.

But that doesn’t mean anything. That has nothing to do with this reunion. With these happy tears. History is not repeating itself. What happened to Norah will not happen to Mallory. I won’t let it.

“Barrett? What’s wrong?” Mallory pushes her way through the crowd toward me, and I can feel everyone watching us. Watching me. The women from the Resort love her. The others want to protect her. And they don’t trust me. Not one of them.

Fuck them. I don’t need their approval. Mallory and I don’t need them at all.

I shake my head as I take her hand, telling her that nothing is wrong. I don’t want to lie to her; I just have no way to explain. Instead, I point my finger toward the ceiling and draw an arch in the air, a symbol we’ve been using to indicate the passage of time. Then I point at the front door.

“Time to go?” she guesses, and I nod. The walk home should only take about an hour, and it’s still early afternoon. If we leave now, we could have a normal evening together.

“No, you can’t go!” Lilli cries. Every time I look at her, I see her standing nude in the woods, on that holo-disk. Waiting to be rented by a stranger. The first time I “met” Mallory’s friend shouldn’t have been with her naked and vulnerable. “Stay!” Lilli turns to Audra. “They can stay, right? Mal belongs here, and Barrett’s…well, he’s not going to hurt her.”

But the look Audra gives a couple of the other women is openly skeptical. And Ty, that big, scarred fucker, notices the silent exchange.

They don’t want me here. And I don’t want to be here. But I’m not leaving without Mallory.

Yet when she turns to me with great big doe eyes, I can see that she wants to stay. “Can we stay? Just for one night?”

One night. Surely I can stomach one night with these judgmental pricks. For Mallory. But that’s not up to me. So I gesture at the room in general, turning the issue over for a vote. Or however they run things in this “Sorority.”

Audra and Ty exchange another look, then she turns back to Mallory and me. “That’s a group decision, and we’ll need to discuss. Could I interest you two in a private lunch, while we have our little meeting?”

“Yes! I’m starving. Thank you!” Mallory turns to me with her brows raised, excitement shining in her eyes. I nod. I’m not sure there’s a fucking thing in the galaxy I could deny her. Not after I nearly killed her in my sleep, then let her get kidnapped.

“I’ll get them some food,” a woman named Danna volunteers.

“Take one of the men with you,” Ty calls out over the crowd. Literally. He’s a head taller than nearly everyone else here. Including me.

“Warren, will you help us out?” Danna asks one of the men hovering at the edge of the crowd. He smiles and makes his way toward us. “This way!” Danna links her arm through Mallory’s and tugs her toward the hallway, leaving me to trail behind.

“Hey. I’m Warren.” The man holding his hand out for me to shake is the only man I haven’t heard anything from yet. We’ve never met, but I’ve seen him around. Mostly at supply drops. I shake his hand, then I follow Mallory into the hallway. “And you’re Barrett Oliver, obviously. I was a champion a few years ago,” Warren says, keeping pace with me. “Long before you were in the arena. I doubt it’s changed much since then.”

I can only shrug.

Danna leads Mallory into another room, and when I follow them inside, I find small stacks of supplies lining the walls. They have a little bit of everything, but not much of anything. But most notable is the small stockpile of rations and a stack of three or four vinyl sleep mats, like the kind we slept on in the bullpen, back when I was a fighter.

Danna grabs a couple of meal packets and hands one to Mallory, but I feel guilty at the thought of eating their food. There are a lot of mouths here. So I wave off the one Danna offers me, and she looks insulted. As if I’m rejecting their hospitality. Damn it.

“Do you not like this kind?” Danna frowns at the label on the package. “We might have—”

I shake my head and wave a hand at the food envelope, but she only stares at me in confusion.

“I think he just doesn’t want to take your food,” Mallory says, and I can’t decide whether she’s the most perceptive woman on the whole damn planet, or she just knows me well. Or, as well as anyone could, considering that I can’t even tell her my own fucking middle name. “We’ll probably just split this one?” She lifts her eyebrows at me in question, and I nod.

Danna glares up at me. “Make sure Mallory gets enough to eat.”

I give her a solemn nod, my hand over my heart.

Danna and Warren lead us across the hall to an empty room, but they don’t follow us in. This room doesn’t have an attached bathroom, and there’s no other exit. It’s basically a large jail cell.

“I gotta stay posted here,” Warren says from the hallway, before I can slide the door closed. “I hope you understand.”

I understand that they don’t trust me. And that that’s as it should be. So I give him a nod, then I close the door in his face.

“You don’t want to stay, do you?” Mallory says as she glances around the empty room. This one is still as bare as the entire building was, back when I scoped it out a few months ago.

I shake my head, and for the millionth time, I wish I had the ability to elaborate. Life isn’t as simple as a yes-or-no question, and I fucking resent being limited to those two answers.

Maybe someone here could teach Mallory to read. The Sorority is close enough to our shelter that we could make several trips a week, if she wanted. She could see her friends and learn how to communicate with me, at the same time. Of course, we have nothing to write in but the dirt, but even that would be an improvement over guessing at made-up hand gestures.

“Well, I want to be wherever you are.” Mallory settles onto the floor. “But it’d be great if you were here, at least occasionally. Because these are my friends, and I thought I’d lost them.” She stares at the food packet in her lap as she speaks, as if she’s afraid to look at me. Afraid of my reaction.

I sink onto the floor next to her and tilt her face up by her chin. Then I nod. I don’t want to take anything away from her. Especially not her friends. She’s already lost her entire family, though I can’t help thinking she’s better off without an uncle who would sell her to Varian.

“So we can come back? To visit?”

I nod again, and Mallory’s eyes light up. She leans forward to drop a kiss right on my lips. Then she rips open the food envelope and dumps the packets on the floor between us.

“Food is always a surprise for me,” she says as she stares at one of the smaller packets. “For instance, this could be powdered hot cocoa or orange drink mix, and I’m not going to know until I open it.”

It’s actually strawberry flavored dairy shake powder. Whatever the hell that means.

“But sometimes I can guess at the entree from feeling around on it.” She squishes the largest packet between her hands. “This one starts with an S, so I’m thinking it’s either spaghetti or some kind of stew.”

It’s spaghetti in meat sauce. Most of the stew packets are actually labeled something like “beef stew” or “vegetarian stew with noodles.”

Mallory rips open the package and sniffs dramatically over the opening. “Spaghetti!” she squeals in triumph.

I nod. Then I point at the second letter in the word.

“S. P.,” she reads. “Yeah, I guess it’d be hard for that to spell ‘stew,’ huh?”

Another nod. She’s smart, and she already understands phonetics. She could learn to read—or relearn, rather—pretty easily, I think.

Easier than I could relearn how to speak, anyway. Her problem doesn’t require a neurologist. Or a miracle.

Mallory tries to hand me the open packet, but I push it back at her and take the one labeled “fig bar” instead. I already know she doesn’t like those, and that she won’t let me get away with not eating anything.

For several minutes, we chew in silence, and my mind wanders to the conversation going on down the hall. I don’t care what they decide, but Mallory wants to stay here tonight. And I want her to have what she wants.

“I didn’t run off, just so you know.”

I turn to her with my brows arched in silent question.

“This morning. I overslept, and these men found me in the field and took me. They said they’d let me go if I let them fuck me, and I thought I could do that. God knows it wouldn’t be the first time.”

She says that as if it means nothing. As if today has been just like any other day in her life. As if she has no right to expect anything kinder from the universe than two men telling her they’ll let her go—after they’re done raping her.

She’s ripping my fucking heart out.

“But…I couldn’t. I used to be able to just push everything away, mentally, and let it happen, but I couldn’t do that today. I don’t think I can do that anymore, at all. I…” There are tears in her eyes now, and she looks terrified. It takes me a second to realize that what she’s scared of is my reaction to whatever she’s about to say. “I don’t want anyone else to touch me, Barrett. No one other than you. Okay?”

As if I’d ever say no to that. The fissure in my heart is a rift, now, and the gaping wound is filling with all the things I can’t tell her. They flow through me like a river, drowning me from the inside, searching for a way out.

She doesn’t know how I feel about her, because I can’t tell her.

How do I feel about her?

I feel that she’s mine. I don’t want anyone else to ever touch her. I don’t want her to dance around naked in the stream in front of anyone else. I don’t want her to crawl back into bed for chocolate flavored kisses with anyone else. But I can’t tell her any of that.

The best I can do is take her hand and lay it over the center of my chest, covered with my own.

“I don’t understand,” she says. So I make a fist of my other hand and partially open it over and over, in a pulsing, beating motion. “Your heart?” she guesses, and I nod. Then I point to her. “I have your heart?”

I shake my head and make the heart sign again. Then I point at her more forcefully.

“I am your heart?”

I nod, without letting go of the hand still pressed against my chest.

Mallory throws herself at me, knocking me over on the floor. She’s straddling me, kissing my whole damn face, while spaghetti leaks out onto the concrete from her abandoned lunch.

I laugh, then I capture her face for a real kiss, taking her mouth like I’d like to take the rest of her.

“Mmm…” Mallory murmurs when I finally let her go. She looks down at me, still sitting on my hips, her hands propped on my chest. “Make love to me, Barrett? Slow, like before?”

I’m not sure we have time for slow, considering that there’s some kind of debate about us going on down the hall, and that Warren is still stationed outside the door. But I’m not going to tell her no. Ever again.

I start to roll us over, then I remember that she has a pretty nasty wound on the back of her head, so I pull the folded blanket from her bag to act as a pillow. Then I lay her down with her head cushioned by the blanket, and I pull her pants off slowly, following the retreating material with a trail of soft kisses down her leg. I work my way back up her body, spreading her legs as I go, and she gasps when I take the first taste of her, licking a long line up her core until I can tease her clit with the tip of my tongue.

Mallory’s hand slides into my hair as I lick her, and for a second, her touch lingers on my scar, as if to tell me she’s not afraid of it. Of what it did to me. What it means for us.

But she doesn’t know the whole story.

I spread her thighs wider and dip into her with my tongue for a second, then I move back up to circle her clit with lazy strokes. Long and slow, just like she wanted.

“Barrett…” she moans, and my cock throbs in my pants. I love the way she says my name. As if the word is important to her. “I know I asked for slow, but—”

The door slides open. “Whoa, shit. Sorry,” Warren says, and I rise up to growl at him, trying to shield Mallory’s nudity from his view with my body. He laughs as he turns to block someone else from the doorway. “They’re still…eating.”

“We’ll be out in a second!” Mallory calls, breathless, as he slides the door shut again. “I guess we should let this wait?”

Fuck no.

I spread her legs again and dive in. Mallory laughs, and I don’t give a damn if they hear her. I don’t care if they all know exactly what we’re doing. Let the fuckers wait. She deserves this.

I alternate quick flicks of her clit with slow circles, and her breathing changes along with my rhythm. Her hands slide into my hair again and clutch at handfuls of it as I feel her thighs tense around me. “Oh, god, Barrett…” she groans, and I lick faster. Then I slide two fingers into her, and she clenches around them immediately.

Despite what’s been done to her—the cruel use and possession of her by strangers and assholes alike—she’s very responsive to a caring touch. Her poor body hungers for it, like her soul craves smiles and kind words. I want to give her all of that.

I want to give her everything.

Mallory’s form goes taut beneath me, as my fingers slide in and out of her body, my tongue teasing her with a rabid appetite of my own. I need to feel her come around my fingers. On my tongue. I need—

“Barrett!” she gasps, and her hips arch toward me. Her body clutches at my fingers in pulsing waves of pleasure, and I twist with each thrust, giving her more sensation. More friction. “Oh god!”

And finally she relaxes, limp on the rough concrete. Spent. I crawl my way up her body again, to her mouth this time, and she pulls me in for a long kiss. “You’re the best,” she murmurs against my lips. “But now I owe you.”

I shake my head firmly. This isn’t a competition. I’m not keeping score. I don’t want this to be like that.

There’s a knock on the door. “Guys?” Warren calls. “I hate to interrupt, but…”

I roll my eyes, and Mallory laughs. “We’re done. I mean, we’re coming. I mean…just a sec.”

Now I’m laughing.

I hand Mallory her underwear and pants, and when she has them on, I slide the door open. But it isn’t Warren who’s waiting for us. It’s Audra, with Ty at her back. “You’re welcome to stay the night,” she says. “Both of you. We don’t have a lot, but what’s ours is yours, while you’re here. Our only condition is that we’d like Kaya to talk to Mallory.”

I lift both brows at Audra.

“Well, since you can’t speak, and I understand that Mallory can’t read, I’m guessing there’s a lot you haven’t been able to tell her. Kaya knows a little bit about you. Your relationship is none of our business; we acknowledge that. But Mallory has a right to know as much about you as I assume you know about her.”

I give her a hesitant nod. It’s not that I want to keep things from Mallory. It’s that I want to be the one to tell her about our shared past. Our mutual enemy.

“Kaya’s also offered to read anything you’d like to write down, for Mallory. In your own words. Maci noticed a piece of paper in your satchel, and by pure luck, we happen to have an ink pen.”

At first, I can only stare at her. Then I nod with my hand over my heart, hoping she recognizes my thanks for what it is.

Finally, I’m going to be able to say something real to Mallory.