Tor froze. “What does that mean?”
There was silence on the line.
“What the fuck does that mean, Jeor?”
“I don’t know. The Polizei found some guy waving it around like a trophy. He was selling off strands of it near the market.”
“How much of her hair?”
“A lot.”
“Get every man on the Roq into the city searching, even that fat chef from the kitchens. Set up a reward, and get it on the news. I’ll be back in an hour.”
Fandig was staring at him hard when he turned around. But he didn’t ask. Fandig was like that. He’d wait.
Tor looked down at his boots, gritting his teeth against the heat rushing up his cheeks. He’d bungled their entire conversation earlier. He just kept making the wrong steps. Vaniiya, if she was killed, he’d never forgive himself. It was like sucking on acid, but he forced himself to meet the eyes of a man he respected and admit the words allowed. “My selissa is missing in a riot.”
Fandig whistled.
“Do I have a new captain of the guard?” Tor forced his voice to stay flat, but his hands fisted with the effort. If anyone touched her, if anyone so much as breathed at her wrong, he’d tear them apart. And fucking Jeor too—that bastard was supposed to be in charge in his absence.
Fandig rose and dropped a hand to the handle of his sword. “Let’s go, Regio.”
30
What if I’m not enough?
KLYM DIDN’T HAVE TIME to find the face of whoever had grabbed her in the crowd. A shove to the back sent her sprawling through a doorway. She hit the concrete floor and landed on her hands and knees.
A dark-haired man yanked the door shut. He flipped the lock and turned on her. “Are you hurt?”
She backed away. He was a Prime. There was no doubt about that, not given the enormous breadth of his shoulders, nor the massive height. She’d come to know the difference.
“No.” She reached for her hair and remembered belatedly that it was gone.
He nodded. “Then come with me. We need to be fast.”
She glanced at the door outside, where the mob still shouted, that amplified voice droning on. Capturing the Selissa of the Roq would put someone in a powerful position. The last thing she wanted was to lead to Tor being extorted.
She looked back at the man standing in the rear doorway. He and Tor could practically be brothers.
He looked like the kind of man from whom she’d never be able to escape. But at least there was only one of him.
She expelled a long breath. “You’ll take me back to the Roq?”
He nodded curtly, and she followed him into an alley that stank of urine and rot.
“This is the direction of the cassia?” She tried to keep any suspicion from her voice, but it was hard. She had no choice now but to disregard them again—with this man. She needed help.
He was big, and he moved like Tor. Like a predator. He moved the way men moved when they’d been trained to look for threats and respond to them.
It was hard not to panic as she followed in his wake, scanning the murky shadows for something she might use as a weapon in case he turned on her.
“What the hell was he thinking, letting you come here alone?”
She stiffened. “Tor doesn’t know I’m here.”
He stopped walking and peered around a stucco wall in an alley. He looked back at her. “Can you do anything about your hair?”
The reminder brought a vain pang. She sank her fingers into her hair. Raggedly cut to above her shoulders, jagged. “Like what? Shave it off? I’m afraid I’m fresh out of razors.”
He made a pfft sound and gestured that she follow him across the alley, past metal containers the size of a hover that stank of rotting things.
She stepped around a puddle oozing from the bottom of one.
“Wait here,” the man grumbled.
In the distance, that amplified voice shouted now about taxes and price hikes and hunger.
She wanted to run, go find other people, but that instinct was dead wrong. While on Argentus, a crowd would mean safety, on Vesta it was the opposite. Her hair would stand out like a beacon. There was no fighting this Prime, and there was no running either. She hesitated, reaching down to lift her skirts before she remembered she wasn’t wearing skirts.
The man came back and shoved a shawl at her. “Cover your head.”
She tied it under her chin like she’d seen some of the elderly Vestige women do.
A second after that, he tossed a rag at her. It was wet, with some sort of strong, antiseptic-scented fluid, and it squelched in her hands. “Wash his mark off your chest.”
“Why?”
“If we run into anyone, I want to be able to pretend that you are just a regular woman. You stink like him.”
“I thought that was the point, though.”
“Up at the Roq, maybe. But down here, you’d be better off smelling like a woman than like the marked property of a Prime.”
She looked at the rag.
“The humani are angry at anyone smacking of authority right now. Down here, that mark is like a heat signal, partly claimed and up for dibs. The bolder they get, the more trouble they’ll become.”
“Aren’t you a Prime?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t they just assume I belonged to you?”
“Maybe, but I don’t want to have to fight a hundred humani just to preserve Tor’s pride. Wash off his mark, or I leave you here.”
The orange puddle in the corner bubbled.
She thought of all the grasping hands, and all the shouting people, and lifted the rag to her neck and washed off Tor’s mark.
The man inclined his head.
She fell into step behind him, narrowing her eyes at his broad back. “How much farther?”
“Twenty minutes to the base of the cliff. From
