I had hoped…
Don’t say it, she thinks, desperate, bitter. Don’t say his name.
And he doesn’t. But his reaction still startles her, like a child’s reaction to being refuted, and her eyes and ears still blink and flicker in surprise—how can he be so young and so powerful?—partially she is afraid of his stature and the power of the muscles that ripple underneath his red skin, for she knows how easily he could overpower her, if he wanted to, and she shudders to think of who he might have already stepped upon.
Blood means nothing in the face of ambition, she knows. And though he has been nothing but kind Iscariot was raised to be suspicious, and even as she smiles at him there is a cold, fearful kind of gnawing in her stomach.
They could be just like each other, Valero and his father; Iscariot had known enough of the latter to know he was a piece of shit, and if their genetic misfortunes had been shared—well, that would be unfortunate. As quickly as she’d met him, he’d be gone again. As suddenly as he lived he would be dead to her again.
Stop, she tells herself, and with no small measure of anger. Be kind for once in your fucking life. She smiles again, perhaps a little stiff, but when she speaks it is with true conviction. “No,” Iscariot agrees. “We don’t.”
And with a shake of her head that rattles the bones in her hair she steps back from him, toward the bridge. She thinks of Leto, and her mother, and the book in her back. She thinks of the ache in her ribs and the splash of brown on her side. She thinks of the rot that must be building in her teeth.
“Let’s go.”
ooc things
