His lips. His tongue.
The trouble was, his scent in her nose, replacing as it did the tinny high notes of the metal-laced air, was working telephone lines on her switchboard that hadn’t rung in a very, very long time.
And then there were his shoulders. Under the well-washed flak shirt he’d put on, they shifted as he took his bites, unbaggied a second sandwich, drank more water. Every time his arm rose, his bicep pulled the sleeve so tight she knew its seam was straining, and every time his arm went down, the shirt seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, a test passed.
His hair was drying now that they were out of the humidity, the waves turning into curls at the long ends, and she had a feeling it would be soft to the touch in a way his body would not. The shampoo he’d used in the Shadow’s shower had left it all shiny—or maybe it had just been soap that he’d rubbed all over his head.
Funny, she couldn’t smell whatever it had been. Usually at the gym where she worked, she had to train her nose away from all the bodywashes, Biolages, and colognes, the human need to artificially enhance their scents a reflection of their subpar olfactory range.
She had this male in her nose and down the back of her throat—
Stay focused on Ahlan, she told herself. What she needed to do was—
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
As the prisoner spoke, Ahmare jerked and had to catch up with what the syllables meant.
“You’re staring at me,” he said as he finished the sandwich. “And I can only guess you’re worried about how the day is going to go. So let me just get that out of the way. I’m not going to touch you.”
The fact that her libido felt a sting of rejection made her want to bang her head into one of the walls until she left a dent in the shape of her own face.
He pointed over to the bunk. “You can sleep there.” Then he pointed across the way in the opposite direction, to a bare wall. “I’ll sleep here. And you always have that trigger. You can drop me in a heartbeat, isn’t that what you said?”
Yes, she had been reminding herself of that fact at different points in this shitty adventure they were on. But concern for her personal safety hadn’t been why she’d been staring at him now, not that he was ever going to know the real reason.
“So tell me about your brother,” the prisoner said as he packed up the empty baggies, picking one to hold all the others.
Ahmare took a deep breath and figured talking was better than silence. “He’s about six-five, so a little shorter than you. Dark hair like mine. Eyes my green color. He came along sixty years after me. I was excited.”
Such basic statistics. That told nothing about Ahlan, really.
She stared down at the half-moon that she’d made in the bread when she’d taken her bite. “Live wire, Ahlan was—I mean, Ahlan is—a live wire. And that was a great characteristic before the raids, something that made the house come alive. After my parents were killed, though . . .” She shook her head. “He went off the rails. In that regard, we both played to type. I doubled down on the self-control, he became a firework going in a thousand different directions. I refused to think about my grief, burying myself in learning skills in self-defense and weapons that came too late. He ran from his, following any distraction he could.”
Clearing her throat, she looked up. “I can’t finish this sandwich. Do you want it?”
The prisoner reached out, and it was then that she noticed two out of his five fingers had no nails.
“They pulled them off so many times,” he explained, “that they stopped growing back.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as he popped what she’d given him into his mouth and put his hand palm up in his lap so the nail beds didn’t show.
“How did Chalen get involved in the story?” he asked.
She opened her mouth to speak. But couldn’t seem to get any words out.
The prisoner’s brows went low, but he didn’t seem offended. It was more like bad memories were coming back to him.
“My father gave me to Chalen,” he told her. When she recoiled, he smiled. At least she thought he did. It was hard to be sure because of the beard. “My father is a very superstitious male, and superstition becomes a hard fact if you believe in it enough.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My father believes that if you kill a direct descendant of yours, you suffer a mortal event yourself. It’s like in his mind, he and I are intrinsically tied together, and if he causes my death, it’s tantamount to committing suicide. He’ll die as well.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“It’s an Old Country thing.”
“I was born in the New World.”