THE MARKET

A bonus scene from Bloodsworn to the Rogue Alpha

Kira Deveraux

Two years before she corners him in a mine shaft, Raith scents his mate for the first time across a crowded market, and he does the thing he will spend the next two years unable to forgive himself for. He turns around and walks away.

He has not meant to be in the town at all. It is a bad winter three years into an exile he has told no one is a choice, and he has come down out of the high passes because a rogue cannot make everything for himself, and there are things a body needs that only a market has. Salt. Oil. Thread for the tear in his one good coat. He keeps his hood up and his fire banked and he is one more scarred drifter among the hundred scarred drifters a border town collects in a hard season, and he moves through the crowd the way he moves through everything now, quietly, wanting nothing, owing nothing, a man who has made himself into no one on purpose.

And then the wind shifts.

It is nothing at first. A change in the air of the kind a market is full of, woodsmoke and wet wool and the copper of the butcher's stall. He does not even slow. And then, threaded under all of it, there is a scent that is not any of those things, frost and iron and something warm beneath, something specific, something his whole body turns toward before his mind has finished deciding it has smelled anything at all.

His fire stands up in his chest.

He has felt it do that exactly never. His fire answers threat, and it answers his own deliberate will, and it has answered nothing else in three years of banking it down to a coal he can carry without being seen. It does not answer now the way it answers a threat. It answers the way a struck bell answers the thing that struck it, a single clean note that runs the length of him and leaves him standing very still in the middle of a market with a bag of salt in one hand, because he knows what this is. Every dragon knows. The old stories pass down the bloodlines like scar tissue, what it feels like when you scent the one the bond has chosen, what it costs to take it, what it costs to refuse.

He finds her without meaning to. His eyes go to her the way water goes downhill, no decision in it. She is across the market at a stall that sells knives, and she is small and dark and still in a way that the crowd is not, a stillness he recognizes because it is a fighter's, a person who reads every room for the exits, and she is turning a blade over in her hands and testing its balance with the particular competence of someone who has needed a blade to be exactly right before and will need it to be exactly right again. She has not seen him. She has no reason to. She is a stranger buying a knife in a market, and she is, the bond in his chest says with a certainty that terrifies him, the other half of everything he is.

Sable. He does not know her name yet. He will not know it for a long time. But he knows, standing there, that she is his, and that the bond has just handed him the one thing in the world he swore after the war he would never let himself hold again, because the last time Raith let himself be near a thing he loved, it burned, and he was the reason.

He watches her buy the knife. He watches her count the coin out, careful, a person who has learned the hard way what a coin is worth. He watches her tuck the blade away and turn to go, and for one moment, one unbearable moment, he lets himself imagine crossing the market. Introducing himself. Being, for the length of a conversation at a knife stall in a border town, a man who is allowed to want a thing and reach for it.

Then he thinks about the war. He thinks about the smoke and the sound of screaming and the weight of knowing he had chosen wrong. He thinks about what a bond is, underneath the old stories, which is a rope tied between two people, and he thinks about what happens to the thing on the other end of a rope when the man holding it goes over a cliff, and he understands that he cannot do it. That the kindest thing, the only decent thing, the one gift he has left to give the woman across the market, is to never let her know she was chosen by a dragon who destroys what he loves.

So he turns around.

He turns around and he walks the other way, out of the market and into the cold, and he tells himself it is strength. He tells himself a dragon who can scent his fated mate and walk away from her is a dragon who has finally learned the lesson the war taught him. He gets three streets away before he has to stop and put a hand against a wall, because the bond does not understand what he has decided, the bond is pulling at him like a hook set behind his sternum, and every step he takes away from her costs him something he does not have a name for and cannot afford to spend and spends anyway.

He does not go back.

He will tell himself, later, that this was the last time. He will tell himself that a great many times, over two years, each time he finds himself three ridges from wherever she is and moving toward her before he has decided to. He will watch her from distances she never suspects. He will learn the scar under her jaw and the way she sleeps with her boots on and the fact that she sets her own wounds. He will kill, quietly, in the dark, the men who mean her harm, and he will let her believe she is safe by her own competence, because the truth is a confession he has no right to make. He will become, without her knowledge and against every intention he formed walking out of that market, the thing standing between her and the world.

But that is all still ahead of him. Tonight there is only the wall, and the cold, and the hook behind his sternum, and a rogue with his hood up who has just walked away from the one thing the bond ever chose for him and told himself it was mercy.

It is not mercy. He knows that already, if he is honest, standing against the wall with his eyes shut. Mercy would have been letting her decide. What he has done is decide for her, the way you decide for a person you have already begun, in the space of one market and one shift of the wind, to love.

He picks up his bag of salt. He goes back up into the passes.

He does not stop thinking about her. Not that night. Not for two years. Not until she walks into a mine shaft with a crossbow and finally, finally, gives him no way left to run.

THE END

Raith and Sable's story is Bloodsworn to the Rogue Alpha.