I Was Matched to Seven SSS Beast Husbands novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Six Cairns
Rhys and Bram meet the new bride with a warning, and her first meal from rust and scrap calms Bram's Fever for the first time in four years.
The wolf stepped out of the dark and became a man.
He was tall, with black hair gone grey at the temples and a scar through his left brow.
His officer's coat was torn, and the rank tabs had been cut off.
He stopped ten feet from the pod and looked at the open hatch.
"Get back in," he said.
His voice was flat and tired, with no heat in it at all.
"It doesn't have engines," Maxine said. "It's a drop shell. One way."
"Then you picked a bad place to land."
"I didn't pick it. The Court did."
Something moved in his face and was gone.
"I know who sent you," he said. "I'm Rhys Denholm. I was a Fleet Commander."
"There are seven of us, and I'm the only one who can talk to you right now."
She slung her bag over her shoulder and climbed down onto the rust-red ground.
The air was thin and warm and smelled of old metal.
Above her, a cracked dome of welded hull plates glowed dull orange.
"Then talk."
"The six before you are under those stones." He did not look at the cairns.
"Go back to the pod. Sleep. When the next ship comes, I'll find a way to put you on it."
"There's no next ship. The Marshal sent me to die."
"Then I'll make sure it's fast."
He said it plainly, as a kindness.
Maxine looked at him a long moment, and then something enormous roared behind the nearest wreck.
The ground shook.
A man came around the hull on all fours and stood up, and kept standing up.
He was nearly seven feet tall, brown-bearded and as wide as a door, with a wrench hanging from his belt.
His eyes were solid red.
"Bram," Rhys said, very quietly. "Bram. Look at me."
The big man did not look at anything.
He swung a fist and a steel plate buckled.
Rhys moved faster than she could follow, caught the arm, and went down under the weight with a grunt.
"Run," he said, from the dirt.
Maxine did not run.
She had seen starving men before, in the life she remembered.
The red eyes, the shaking, the grabbing at nothing.
It wasn't rage.
It was hunger so old it had forgotten its own name.
She dropped to her knees, dragged her bag open, and pulled out the one thing she had been allowed to bring.
Her grandmother's soup pot, dented on one side, black from forty years of fires.
"What are you doing?" Rhys got out.
"Hold him another five minutes."
She grabbed a handful of the green-black vine that grew over every wreck in sight.
Then she tore the lid off a flour crate half buried in the dirt.
Grey flour, weevils in it, years old.
She picked the weevils out with calm fingers.
She had eaten worse.
She set the pot on a flat piece of scrap and put her right hand over it.
Clean water ran out of her palm in a bright, steady stream until the pot was half full.
Behind her, Rhys went completely still.
She put her left hand under the pot, and the scrap beneath it caught fire.
It was a low gold flame that gave off no smoke.
"That's not possible," Rhys said.
"I know. Don't tell the Court."
She boiled the vine twice, because it was bitter, and she knew exactly how bitter.
She tipped the water out and added fresh.
She crumbled in a pinch of grey salt scraped from the hull and stirred the flour until it thickened.
The smell rose and spread across the plain.
It was only vine and flour, but she had spent eleven winters learning to make nothing taste like home.
Bram's head came up slowly.
The red in his eyes flickered.
She ladled a bowl and walked toward him.
"Maxine," Rhys said, hoarse. "Don't."
"He's hungry."
"He'll kill you."
"Then I'll die with the bowl in my hands."
She put it in front of the giant's chest and stepped back.
Nothing happened for a very long count of five.
Then Bram knelt, picked up the bowl in both enormous hands, and drank it down in three swallows.
He closed his eyes.
His whole body shook once, from his shoulders to his boots.
When he opened his eyes again they were brown, with a rim of wet red around them.
He looked at the bowl.
He looked at Maxine.
"That was warm," he said, in a deep, cracked, puzzled voice.
He turned his head, found Rhys pinned under his own arm, and his face fell open.
"Rhys? Oh, no. Did I do that?"
Rhys did not answer.
He was staring at his friend.
Bram scrambled off him in huge, apologetic fumbling.
"I'm so sorry, commander, I don't know what, I was in the yard and then I wasn't."
Maxine refilled the bowl.
"Eat. There's more."
Bram took it with both hands, like something holy.
Rhys got to his feet slowly and brushed off his coat.
He looked at the pot, at the steam, and at the girl in the grey Court jumpsuit with water still running down her wrist.
When he spoke, the flatness had cracked, and underneath it was something raw.
"He has not said my name in four years," Rhys said. "Not once. Do that again."
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