BONDED ENEMIES

Chapter 2: New Growth

Once a week. At minimum.

The words had ridden home with him the whole way — through the checkpoint, along the service road where the city gave out and the private land began, sitting behind his eyes like a splinter he could not get his thumbnail under. Ward had not softened them. Ward had read them off the chart the way he read off a dosage, and then he had gone out into the corridor with his ears going red, which had been the one satisfying thing in the hour.

Damn it.

Of every Alpha in the Federation, it had to be Kestrel. That name had sat in the margins of Silas's reports for years, attached to every incident that ever needed a footnote, and the month he had come home from was not going to be the exception.

He left the car at the head of the drive and walked the rest of it. The lamps along the courtyard wall were on their low setting. The flagstones threw back a thin gray light, and the flower bed in front of the house stood up out of it — a border of dull evergreen, and one pot in the middle that had held a single stalk since spring.

There was more in it now. Under the old woody stem, pushed up through the soil at an angle, a second shoot had come: pale, thin, still furled at the tip, and tough enough to break the crust the dry weather had left on the surface.

Silas crouched and touched the tip of it with one finger.

It gave under his fingertip, alive and unresisting, and nothing else he had put his hands on all day had given like that. He kept the finger there for a second, took the hand back, and stood up.

The decision was hours old. He had made it, and it would stand.

He went up the steps, and the house had the door open for him before he reached it.

* * *

The front hall was high enough to have its own weather, and the corridor off it ran longer than the house needed it to run, so his boots kept a double echo the whole way down. A cleaning unit rolled out of its alcove and went to work on the dust he had brought in off the drive, and followed him the length of the hall, and was still following when he stepped into the elevator. The house had been built to keep dust out of itself and had never been told where dust came from.

"Welcome home," the house said, in the flat voice it used for everything, which was the voice of a clerk reading off a shipping manifest.

"Where is Kestrel?"

"Basement. The elevator is on the lower level. Do you want him brought up?"

"No. I'll go down."

He rode down alone, the lights coming up ahead of him one panel at a time. He had built that room for himself; that was the part he kept coming back to. A bed, a wall of diagnostic ports, and the restraints — synthetic, rated to a man of his own grade, tuned to take the edge off a rut and, if a body went past the edge anyway, to put it down with a shock and then with sedative. He had signed off on every specification. He had never once needed the restraints.

An Alpha at the top of the board had more of everything. Reach, load, looks — and the same math that made a man useful in a cockpit and dangerous everywhere else applied, without exception, to a rut. The higher the rating, the worse it ran, and the standard answers were two. Wait for a match above ninety-five percent, which in practice meant waiting forever; or take the week spread across dozens of Omegas at once. The service had a name for the men who chose that second one. It was not a compliment, and Silas had never been one of them.

He had gone into that wormhole an Alpha.

Three weeks and a few days, said the machine that ran the numbers. That was how far back it put the beginning. Which left exactly one other person who had come out of that wormhole with him, and that person was currently shackled to a bed in his basement with his shirt half off.

He still did not know what Kestrel had been doing in there. He had intended to find out on the day of the hearing, with the Tribunal in the room and a record running and the man under oath. That plan had held until the seventh day, when he had collapsed in a corridor.

The Natal Protection Act did not care about the plan.

The other parent was a prisoner, and the capture report carried Silas's own signature, and the hearing date was already on the board. That made every question left in the case a matter for the President's office and not for any hospital on the planet.

Three weeks and change, and the fetus was not holding. Growth had stalled and was not catching up. The only thing that moved it was pheromone from the other parent — delivered in person, delivered continuously — and nothing a machine could make came close to counterfeiting it.

So Kestrel stayed. He stayed where Silas could reach him on a schedule, behind a lock that answered only to Silas, and the only address in the known systems that satisfied all of it was the one Silas was standing in.

He rubbed his brow. Then the panel took his palm, and the doors withdrew into the wall, and the air that came out into the corridor was colder than the corridor, and carried under the alloy and the disinfectant the warm smell of a strange Alpha who had been shut in one room too long.

He went in.

* * *

Kestrel was on his back in the middle of the bed, laid out like a man on a rack — arms out, legs out, four chains running to the frame at the corners, so that every small shift of him rang metal against the rails. His shirt had been through something. It hung open down the middle and was past saving, and the muscle of his waist and belly showed through it in pale hard blocks. There were teeth marks on his collarbone, and one on his wrist that had gone black under a half-fallen scab. Whoever had put that one there had used real force. It had bled.

The silver hair was loose on the pillow, and with his face quiet there was nothing in it at all of the pirate fleet's youngest captain. He was long-lashed and pale past healthy, and the mole beside his throat moved when he swallowed.

He watched Silas come. He made a show of it — eyes down the length of him and back up, a slow appraisal, calculated to be noticed.

"Well," he said. "Got a taste for it, then? Come down here so I can finish what I started?"

Silas took his gloves off at the door, left them on the small table there, and crossed the room in three strides. He got a knee onto the mattress and a fist into Kestrel's collar and put his open hand across the man's face — a flat, heavy blow that turned his head and pulled the chains tight on that side. Then he hauled him up by the collar until they were eye to eye.

"Understand where you are," he said. "You're my prisoner."

Kestrel grinned at him, wide and unrepentant, and rolled his hips up.

It was a stupid, obvious move and it landed anyway, because Silas had come in with his weight forward on his knees and had nowhere to put it. He came down out of the kneel and landed sitting, and Kestrel laughed up into his face.

"Was it the technique?" he said. "Because mine has never had a complaint. Is that why you had to go and pull me out of the First Prison and bring me home for more?"

Silas hit him backhand, and his own palm stung for it. The heat came up under his skin and stayed under it. None of it reached his face.

It would have been easier if the man had been wrong. He had brought Kestrel out of the First Prison because the child needed his pheromones — true. He had brought him here instead of to a cell because the chart said closer was better — also true. Underneath both of those, in a place he could not get at: he had needed to finish it. The reason was wrong. The result was right. It left him with nothing solid to stand on while he said any of it out loud.

Kestrel's mouth was already running again.

"Hit a nerve. Silas Vance." He said the name the way a man checks a lock. "All those years with that face. The one on the recruiting posters. The one they put on the news when they want everybody to sleep at night. And here you are, kneeling on a prisoner in your own basement." He looked him over, slow, from the collar down. "What do you think they'd do if they could see it? The Federation's best hope. Its most popular First Admiral." He drew the breath back in through his teeth. "Not so particular after all, are you. Starved for it. Starved for a man who—"

Silas kissed him.

He was bad at it. That was the first thing and the only thing he had time to notice: he came in at the wrong angle, one hand still knotted in the collar for balance, his teeth dragging across Kestrel's teeth, with no idea what a mouth was supposed to do when it arrived. He had come down here to shut the man up and to take what Ward said he had to take, and the taking turned out to happen on its own. The moment his mouth closed over Kestrel's, the seal broke and the pheromone went out of him, cold and green, mint flooding the space between them.

Kestrel's mouth had been open on a word. It stayed open.

Silas felt the exact moment it landed. There was no other way to put it, and he would spend the rest of the night not putting it into words: the instant where it passed the man's tongue and went down, and stopped being a smell and became an order.

Kestrel came up off the mattress.

He came up hard enough to bring all four chains straight and put a bang into the room, and he did not stop. He kissed back like a man trying to get at something under the skin of it, half a curse somewhere in the middle and then nothing but breath, and every time he pulled, the chains answered, so that the noise went around the walls and came back. His hands could not reach. That made it worse.

Silas broke it off first, which cost him more than he had budgeted for. He got both hands flat on Kestrel's chest and pushed himself up, and for a while there was nothing in the room but the two of them breathing, and one chain ringing where Kestrel was still working against it.

Sweat had come up on Silas's forehead. A drop of it hung, fell, and landed on the mole beside Kestrel's throat.

He had not been in love. He had not held anybody's hand, and a week ago he would have told anyone who asked that it was a thing he had no use for. The wormhole did not count; he had no memory in that month to stand behind, only fragments and heat and a body that had gone on working without him. Today's kiss was the first one he had given a person on purpose, in his right mind, and he could not have said whether he liked it. He needed the pheromone, and Ward's chart said the closer the contact the better it took, and kissing was the first step on the chart.

Kestrel's chest was still going like a man coming off a run. He stared up at Silas with the chains slack again and his mouth working, and what came out was:

"Silas." A pause. "Are you — are you in love with me?"

As if.

Silas was briefly grateful that the vomiting had not started yet. It would have gone on Kestrel's face.

He looked at Kestrel for a moment and let the disgust sit in his face where the man could see it.

"If every Alpha in the Federation dropped dead tomorrow," he said, "I still wouldn't want you."

Kestrel's voice cracked upward. "The hell is wrong with you? We're both Alphas. You can't just— you're out of your mind."

"Can you not tell the difference," Silas said, "between an Alpha and an Omega?"

Kestrel stopped. The chains settled. Silas watched something move through his face, and watched him decide what it meant, and then it came out of him in a rush, high and appalled and completely certain.

"You're faking," he said. "You're pretending to be an Omega." His eyes got wider. "You're pretending to be an Omega to get me."

Silas got off the bed. He collected his gloves from the table by the door, and the door let him out, and he did not answer, because anything he said in that room was going to land wrong.

In the elevator he pulled the gloves back on and did the arithmetic without wanting to. One delivery made. Six days until the next one, and the chart ranked every kind of contact from good to better, and he was going to be walking up that ranking six days at a time for the rest of it.

At the top of the stairs the house said, in the flat voice it used for the schedule, "Reminder. Prisoner Kestrel. Tribunal hearing: twelve days."

Silas put his palm on the panel until the countdown went black.

* * *

The door sealed, and the room went back to being the room.

Kestrel lay in the middle of it and worked his jaw. He could still taste it. Cold — the man's mouth was cold, and it had gone in past his tongue and down his throat and settled somewhere behind his breastbone, and he swallowed twice and it was still there.

He brought his wrist up as far as the chain allowed and looked at it.

There was a bite on it, deep, scabbed around the print of somebody's teeth. There was another one on his collarbone. He turned the wrist in the low light and looked at it for a long time.

He did not know who had put them there.

That was the piece he could not get past, and he had been trying all week. He remembered the needle, and the floor, and the boots. He remembered the First Prison — seven days of it, the food, the wall, the man in the next cell, all of it in order. What was not there was the month before the needle. Somewhere in that month somebody had put their teeth through his wrist, and the only thing in the room offering to explain it was a cold mouth and an Admiral with a plan he wasn't saying out loud.

He laid the arm back down on the mattress. The chain rang once against the rail, and he lay looking at the ceiling with his mouth still cold, trying to remember whose teeth those were.