BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 3: The Terms

He came up out of the basement with no weight in his legs.

He noticed it on the second stair. Seven days of running the department on four hours a night and a stimulant, and one mouth against his had cleared the whole ledger. Ward's chart said pheromone regulation. Ward had been right. It was not the mechanism Silas disliked. It was that he had needed it — that it had cost him one kiss off a ranked list that ran from good to better — and that in six days he would be walking back down those stairs to the next line on it.

At the door he had looked back. Not on purpose. His head turned the way it turned at a sound he was supposed to be able to place. Kestrel was flat on the mattress with his hair spread out and his jaw still going, arguing with the ceiling. The face could be inherited. Silas would concede the face to biology without a fight. Everything behind it was going to need managing, and probably a tutor.

The service parental form had two signature lines on it, one for the Omega and one for the partner Alpha. He had signed the first line on other men's forms for six years without reading past it. His own file said Omega now, which meant some clerk in the Cabinet offices was going to be typing a name into the second line this week — and the partner Alpha to be named was chained to a bed in Silas's basement under a Tribunal case number.

He put that away and walked on. He got as far as the corridor outside his own doors. Then he stood there for a while, and turned around, and went back down.

Because by morning Kestrel would be a man who had been handed a promise, and a promise from the man holding the chain was worth exactly what the chained man decided it was worth. Silas wanted it written, sealed, and past argument before the day started. He stopped in the study, opened the drawer, and took out the two copies Ward had printed that afternoon — Ward printed everything twice, on the theory that one of them always got lost — with every blank at the bottom still blank. Then he went as far as the basement stairs, took the roll of tape off the top of Ward's kit where it sat on the shelf, and went down the rest of the way.

The door read him and let him in.

Kestrel turned his head on the mattress, and the first thing he did was breathe, two short pulls through the nose, testing the air like an animal checking a room; and then he said the wrong thing with enormous confidence.

"You sprayed it on."

Silas stopped at the end of the bed.

"Omega pheromone. Your neck, or your wrists, somewhere." Kestrel got an elbow under himself and the chain took the weight back off it. "So you could get me going. And then you came down here in the middle of the night, which — you have to know how that looks. You want me that badly?"

Silas did not answer him.

His silence went in one ear and came out of the other as an admission. Kestrel's face did something he was plainly proud of.

"All right. Before this goes any further, you should know what you're dealing with, because I'm generous about almost everything and I'm not generous about this. I have standards." He shifted his shoulders against the mattress and found a better position from which to be insulting. "Objectively, you're not nothing to look at. But you're not in the category. You and I would be better off in a ring than anywhere else. That's not an insult, that's arithmetic."

Silas let him finish. Then he let his eyes travel down the man's body without hurrying, stop at the one part of him that had not heard a word of it, and come back up.

"Shouldn't you ask him first?" he said.

"That's the pheromone. That has nothing to do with you." Kestrel's chin came up. "And whatever you came down here for — you can't force a thing like that. It doesn't work that way. Everybody knows that."

Silas's back teeth met. He had three answers loaded and every one of them would have cost him a prisoner, so he said nothing at all, crossed to the shelf, and came back with the tape.

Kestrel read the tape and started moving. "No. No, wait—"

He got about halfway to sitting. Silas put a hand on the back of his head, laid him flat with somewhat more weight than the job required, and taped his mouth shut in two passes. The noise stopped.

Taped to a mattress in a locked room, Kestrel did not appear to know that the mattress itself, the working heat in the walls, and the continued use of his jaw had all been negotiated on his behalf by something under four weeks old. Silas was not going to be the one to tell him.

He pulled the chair out from under the desk with his foot, sat down facing the bed, and leaned forward with his forearms on his knees. Kestrel glared at him over the tape with his eyes doing everything his mouth could not.

"First," Silas said. "I didn't spray anything on myself."

Kestrel said something into the tape.

"Second. I'm pregnant. The child is mine and I'm keeping it. It needs an Alpha's pheromone to settle, yours is the one it's attached to, and until it's born, when I ask, you give."

The struggling changed while he watched it: both arms first, hard enough to shake the rails; then just the hands, opening and closing. Somewhere behind all that the eyes went from murderous to blank, and then to something Silas had no name for.

"Third." Silas took hold of the corner of the tape. "Every Alpha in the Federation could drop dead tonight. I still wouldn't want you." His thumbnail found the edge, and his hand stopped there. "That one isn't anger talking."

He pulled the tape off in one strip and laid it on the desk. Kestrel did not swear at him. He lay there breathing and staring at Silas's middle, which was flat, and stayed flat, and gave nothing away at all.

"You're actually pregnant," he said. His voice came out slow and entirely unlike the one he had been using. "Say that again."

Silas took the folder off the end of the mattress and opened it flat on the corner, where the man's right hand could reach it. The top of the page carried his name, typed in by somebody in the Tribunal clerk's office who had never once had to say it out loud — *Adrian Kestrel, prisoner of the Tribunal* — and under it a blank line for a signature.

"Two copies. Same text." He read it out in the order it was written: duration, pheromone on request, medical access, the conditions of the cell. "When the child is born you go back to your own territory and you never come near us again. There's no money on the other side of the page. No terms, no trade. Sign it, and I let you go."

Kestrel looked at the pages, then at him.

"The kid is mine," he said.

Silas did not answer that one.

"You're going to have it." Kestrel's eyes came up off the paper. "You're going to carry it, and have it."

"Yes."

"Bullshit." It came out of him at full volume and the chains rang with it. "Bullshit, Vance. You're an Alpha. Top-grade — I've fought you. I've had your blood on my hands. How does an Alpha—"

"Biologically you're the other half of it." Silas laid one copy on the mattress inside the reach of that hand and set the pen along its edge. The other copy went back into the folder. "I'm carrying it. You can't have it. The reason you're still breathing is that I won't do that to my child, and that is the whole reason, and it's all you're getting. Sign it or don't. I'll know by morning."

He took the folder and went out. Up the stairs, through the house, into the lift, and out into the hall — and breathing the ordinary air of the ground floor, he found that the thing behind his ribs had loosened a little without asking his permission.

Ward was standing outside the lift with his hands behind his back and his kit under one arm, which meant he had been standing there a while and had arranged himself to look like he had just arrived.

"Admiral."

Silas handed him the roll of tape. Ward looked at it, and put it in the kit, and did not ask.

"Nothing from tonight goes into a file, a log, or a message," Silas said. "Not the Tribunal, not the Cabinet, not the President's office. If anyone comes asking, they come to me first."

"Yes, Admiral." Ward's hands went back behind him. "The hearing is in twelve days."

"I know when the hearing is."

"Yes, Admiral."

The house had made dinner: soup, a plate of greens, a cut of fish, all of it mild, none of it anything he had asked for. The table sat twenty and the room was quiet enough that he could hear the refrigeration cycle through the wall. There were no people in the house. It had come with the rank, the way the car and the office had, and every First Admiral was issued one on appointment, and other men filled theirs with cooks and orderlies and somebody to answer the door. Silas had filled his with systems. The systems were excellent, and the rooms were as empty at nine at night as they were at four in the morning.

"Shall I send a tray to the basement?" the house said.

"No." He ate a piece of the fish. "He eats when he signs."

"Understood, Admiral."

"Tell me when he signs."

"Yes, Admiral."

After dinner he opened Ward's file. Nine pages of first-trimester notes, single-spaced, every page written in the tone of a man who expected his patient to argue with him — what to eat, what to stop lifting, when to sleep, which symptoms were noise and which were a call at three in the morning. Silas read all nine. At the bottom of the last screen there was one line on its own, with three exclamation marks behind it, which was emphatic enough that he could picture Ward typing it, deleting it, and typing it again.

*Alpha pheromone regulation is not optional — for you or for the child!!!*

He looked at that for a while. Then he added two lines to the log he had started keeping the day of the diagnosis — contact, first delivery, fatigue cleared; sleep to be observed — and went to bed before ten and slept without waking.

The alarm went at his usual hour, an hour before the house thought the day ought to start. He ran the loop around the pool at the back of the house at two-thirds of his old pace and stopped where he had planned to stop, which was the first instruction in Ward's file he had actually followed. The body had not gone. Ward's notes said Omegas were built differently, slower off the line; Silas had been an Alpha his entire life and a sample of one for three weeks, which meant his numbers could be entered in a file and compared to nothing.

He came back in sweating and not finished, and went to the lift meaning to take it up to the mech sim and run himself out properly on a route he had already cleared eleven times.

The lift spoke before the doors finished opening. "Admiral. The Alpha in the basement signed the contract."

"When?"

"At 02:40. You were asleep. I judged it could wait until morning."

"Bring up the basement," Silas said, "on the training-room wall."

The feed came up while he was still crossing the floor. Kestrel was face down with one arm hanging off the mattress and his hair over his eyes, dead to the world, breathing slow, sleeping the way a man sleeps in a house that isn't his and doesn't want him in it. On the corner of the mattress the page lay where Silas had left it, the pen across it, the bottom line filled in. The man had signed it in the dark between two and three and then gone to sleep like a man on holiday.

Silas stood there with the rig half in his hand and looked at that for a while. His morning, which had been fine, stopped being fine.

"Restraints," he said. "Both pairs."

The control screen came up over the wall: two pairs of shackles, four locks, and a row of settings he had never once had a reason to open. He touched the second option and the panel expanded under his hand — shock, with an intensity bar and a plus sign at the end of it. He pressed the plus sign twelve times. Then he pressed confirm.

The speakers in the training room carried the voice up four floors and through three walls, perfectly clear.

"You—" A long ragged breath, taken between the teeth. "You absolute— come down here. Come down here and fight me, one round, no chains, and I'll—"

The voice stopped.

Then, much lower, and much worse: "—after you've had the baby."

The man heard himself say it. Silas watched him try to take it back, fail, and stop moving; then his eyes came open and stayed open and looked at nothing in the room. A few seconds later the sheet moved.

So that was where he had gone, then — off somewhere inside his own skull, and he had taken the rest of himself along with it. Silas had watched men bleed out on a shuttle-bay floor with less on their faces.

He walked to the wall, put the slider at the top of the bar, and pressed start. Then he set the sim for two hours, put the rig on, and went back to the mountain.

* * *

Adrian came back to the ceiling with his ears ringing and his own hair stinking.

The smell was the first thing, like a struck match held too close, and under it the green.

He had it. That was the part he could not do anything about — lying there with his wrists in irons, he had it, and it had not come as a story or a face. It came the way a room comes when the lights come up in sections. Green, wet, hot. Air too thick to breathe and too sweet to want to. Something under his hands that turned easily when he held it, and a waist he could get one hand around, and his own jaw aching the way it ached after a long fight or a long kiss.

And then his teeth going through skin, and the give of it, and the blood, and the pressure of the mark closing behind it. His. He had done that. He could feel his own mouth remembering the shape of it — the wrist held in both hands, the noise the other one made.

There was no face in it anywhere.

He turned it over twice and could not find one, and the pieces came apart as soon as he closed around them — green, heat, the weight of a body on him, a name he could not put on any of it — and no face, no face, no face.

He got his hand up as far as the rail and held on and waited for the ceiling to settle.

* * *

Silas finished the sim, came out of the rig with his shirt wet through, and showered on the fourth floor without going down.

The kitchen had left a tray of buns on the counter under a cover, the way it left a tray there every morning, and he took four of them into the lift and pressed minus one.

The room smelled of scorched hair. Kestrel was on the mattress on his back, wrung flat, and he turned his eyes over without moving anything else, which seemed to cost him some effort.

"You," he said. His voice was down to gravel. "You've got a lot of nerve, Vance. For a man who wants something."

Silas threw the buns at him, one after the other; three hit the mattress and one landed on the floor by the frame. Then he picked the signed page up off the corner of the mattress, and opened the safe in the wall beside the door, and put the page inside in front of him, and shut the door on it and turned the handle until it locked.

He walked out. The door sealed behind him. He took the stairs two at a time, because he had not eaten since before the run.