Born of Fire

She didn’t know what the word was. All she knew was that in spite of how they’d come together and what might happen in the coming days, she was glad she was here with him at this moment.

He lifted her hand again and brushed a kiss along her fingers before nipping her fingertips with his teeth. “I was always interested in chemistry and biology, so I started taking courses in that. One day one of my professors suggested I think about a career in medicine.”

“And you became a doctor.”

“Well, it wasn’t quite that easy.” He took a deep breath and swapped her hand for her braid.

She watched as he brushed it against the palm of his hand, then twisted his fingers in it. “I knew I didn’t want to be a filch the rest of my life. For one thing, my activities had a way of getting back to the Rits and I had to stay on the move. And besides that, filches have very short life expectancies. So after a while I started thinking about what the professor had said.”

He touched her braid to the tip of her nose. “It started looking like a great opportunity. All my life, all I’d ever craved was respectability.”

“And doctors are always respected.”

“Exactly.” He raised her hair to his face and ran the tip of her hair across his chin. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he was savoring it.

“How did you get into school? Don’t they require birth certificates or records?”

“Nykyrian forged everything I needed. He used his League contacts to give me a whole new identity.”

“Ah. So what happened that you left it all behind?”

He dropped her hair. “I was found out.”

“By?”

“It’s not important.”

And though she longed for an answer, the note in his voice told her that he was through confiding in her. He’d exceeded his word count.

She started to point out that his tongue had yet to explode, but she thought better of it.

Besides, he would just come up with another smartass retort.

Even though it was probably more than he’d ever told anyone, it still left her feeling on the outside of him. She wondered what it would take to breach his defenses, to make him trust again.

But then, trusting her would probably be the worst thing he could ever do.

“Now that I’ve dumped my sordid past on you, I want you to answer a question.”

She lifted her brows. “Okay.”

“How did the daughter of a fifth rate smuggler end up as a trained seax? I thought seax’s followed a strict bloodline.”

“They do. My uncle on my mother’s side was a seax and he marked me for training when I was just a toddler.”

“Why not Caillen?”

She stopped just short of confiding a secret not even Caillen knew about his birth. Even though Syn had told her so much about himself, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that Caillen was a foundling they’d adopted. Her brother had no memory of it and to their family it had never mattered that he wasn’t theirs by blood.

Except for the matter of seax training.

So she told him that alternate truth. “He didn’t think Caillen had a warrior’s spirit.”

He laughed. “No, I guess he doesn’t. He is a bit of a fly-by-the-crotch kind of pilot.”

She joined his laughter. “He is indeed. I swear I should have gelded him when he hit puberty. Gah, he’s been unbearable since the moment he discovered girls were good for something other than throwing rocks at.”

“Darling’s pet name for him is manwhore.”

“So is ours.”

He started to reach out for her again, but something made him pull his hand back. “So what made you decide to be a tracer?”

Shahara thought back to her childhood and sighed. “I think I did it in part to spite my father. He always hated tracers. Said they were too full of themselves for his tastes. And too, out of all the occupations open for me at the time of his death, it not only allowed me to uphold my oath as a seax, but also paid the best. And it gave me a loose schedule that allowed me to be home when Tessa and Kasen needed me.”

He nodded. “I used to envy the way the four of you pulled together to survive. But the last few years of Tessa’s gambling debts have made me realize how lucky I was that I never had anyone else to look out for.”

It bothered her that he knew so much about her family already. It put her at a terrible disadvantage. “I must admit that there were a couple of times when I seriously thought about running away from them. I was too young to have so much responsibility dumped on me, but I knew if I surrendered us to the government we’d be separated and I couldn’t stand the thought of them being abused the way I’d been. Not to mention, I couldn’t survive without them and while Caillen would have managed all right without us, I don’t think Kasen or Tessa would have survived on their own.”

“No, they can’t even survive now on their own.”