The assessing aspect of his gaze chills me. Is he calculating how much Iku MEAT he could get out of me?
He doesn’t move, though, and neither do I. His eyes stay on me. For a man determined to leave me in peace, he seems perfectly content to hang out here and torture me with his hot looks.
I need to make him an ally. I just don’t know how. The usual methods seem…ineffective. He’s joining a growing line of men who don’t seem overly ensnared by my feminine wiles. Wasn’t that the entire deal here? I was brought up to be someone’s unmodded fetish, a pliant curiosity from the mines to be ogled, controlled, and fucked. I thought it was a way I could get information, control him a little with his, like, burning desire for my body or whatever. I don’t know…
“Listen,” I say, my pulse quickening, “I volunteered because you had some kind of need? I was promised a pervert.”
The machine laughs—or chokes, or…he emits a wheezing sound that make me want to take a step back. He looks up, surprised at the noise himself.
“I am sorry to disappoint,” he says. The corners of his mouth rise.
“Why would your family go through all this?” I ask. I overheard enough. Their whispers, their sideways glances. “Whoever sent me here wants to see you hurt.”
There’s a sharpness to my voice, an edge I don’t even try to soften. It isn’t for him—I barely know the guy—but I feel real anger directed at the faceless people who reached for me in the railcar, talked about me like I was something they could have anytime they wanted.
It’s a strange kind of solidarity, standing here with this man who likely feels just as trapped as I do, though I’d never have guessed that at first. It’s becoming our first united front as husband and wife: hating those assholes who are turning the screws.
“Those guys can go get fucked, am I right?”
I don’t expect him to laugh, and he doesn’t, but I catch the smallest flicker in his eyes, like maybe he agrees. Maybe this is something we can share.
“You’re here to embarrass me,” he says, finally throwing me a bone. There’s no anger in it, no bitterness, just a quiet resignation that settles over him like a shadow. “There was a plan in place, bigger than me, bigger than the sector, and I disrupted it. I didn’t want those deaths on my hands. The bad meat.”
The food supply is so tenuous, a tiny ripple could lead to war or starvation. “That tainted meat has got everybody spooked,” I say. “It’s got folk thinking about another burn.” I test out the vendors theory, but the man is giving away nothing with his face.
“Forty-nine deaths and rising. Too few if you ask some people,” he continues, “So they tried to set me up with an embarrassingly unsuitable fiancé. They think arranging a zero-percenter marriage—just about the most socially taboo thing you can do up here—is punishment.”
I frowned. “Is it?”
“No. I doubled down and married you.”
No hesitation, just a hot, flat statement that honestly leaves me a little breathless. They had tried to arrange an embarrassing engagement- a spoonful of poison, and he instead, swallowed the whole caldron. So, he’s not dead inside. He’s just pissed enough to be petty.
“We weren’t supposed to be married,” I say. I remember the conversation in the railcars—they expected him to fold at the sight of me.
“No, I was supposed to fall in line. You were athreat. And now you’re my wife.” Elevating a skin bride to a public legal marriage in a prominent family leaves too many questions about desirability—and who is ontopof that hierarchy of desirability—open. He’s betting that it will cause the family more harm than they anticipated. And he’s probably right.
His audacity almost makes me like him. But I can’t afford to, especially if he turns out to be behind the plans to destroy my sector.
“I should tell you that th-there is a—you are emitting a smell. Is this a mine smell? Or—” Ben stammers.
It’s cute that he’s being delicate. I stink like metal and oil and rust and sweat.
“No, I just had a long, hot, sticky day. Could you spare the water?”
“We have plenty of water to spare. My bots can help you soak this dirt off.” His three monsters walk stifly toward me.
“Whoa…I… They’re neuro-linked, right? Do your manny bots see what you see?”
“They do.” He says this flatly like all his sentences, but his gaze is the opposite of his tone. His eyes drift from my face to the slope of my bare shoulder, pausing at the diamond gleaming in my collarbone. And my pulse is betraying me, thumping against the cool metal of my diamond.
“Alas, a pervert,” I say.
Chapter9
Clean-Cut
Istep out of the bath on legs that feel scandalously soft. The bots have gone too far this time. I didn’t know what to expect, but a bath—an actual bath—was not on my bingo card for the day.
