words at once. She’d lost the meaning.
He didn’t seem to notice.
He paced the length of the cave before returning to grip her chin, his gaze drilling into hers. “There was also a tribe that required several rituals through adolescence before they allowed their people to take an official name.” He blew out a breath. “I’m reaching here…”
“My origin fixed.” From the way her captor and the others were chained, beaten, and used at 223’s camp, she’d been certain they must have a Gazi caste or something similar among their pack, just as existed in hers. “Never be changed. I never be other than Gazi.”
His gaze drilled into her, his frustration obvious. “We’re talking in circles.”
She shrugged. It seemed clear enough to her.
But something was changing in the air, something that left her captor agitated, and she didn’t understand it at all.
He ran another hand down his jaw, his movement brisk and troubled. “You’re not at all what I thought you were, are you?”
How could she know what he thought she was? It was so nonsensical it made her wonder if the curse was actually working now. Was her capture finally succumbing as Talg had predicted? The thought did not please her as much as it should.
A loud click. One manacle slid open, then the next. Her arms were no longer suspended. Her feet landed fully on the dirt.
She could barely absorb the shift. What had happened?
Firm fingers dug into the tight flesh at her shoulders. “This will feel good.”
Since when did an Other want that for someone else?
She bucked against his hold, but with her ankles bound and her body spent, there was little force behind it.
He stilled her easily, one corded forearm wrapping around her waist and checking her in place. “Behave, wild thing.” His gruff voice was all command. “This is not meant to wind you up, but to bring you down.”
She had no idea what half his rumbled words meant or why he was suddenly being gentle. Still, closing her eyes, she surrendered to the firm pressure of his touch, trying to distance her mind as his thick fingers worked away the twinges at her shoulders and the steady pressure calmed the fire between her thighs.
Despite herself, her breathing slowed, the throbbing heat mellowing with every forceful knead. Even now, he knew exactly how to touch her.
“Better?” His warm breath rasped against her cheek.
She bit back a howl. Because no, nothing about this was better.
Yes, the terrible mind-stealing burn was dulling to a low flame, but something equally as troubling was filling her chest instead.
No one had ever tended to her before. His caretaking marked her deeper than the rough snap of his rope or the devastating touch of his hand.
The starving, half-mad part of her surged, trembling and needy, toward the new experience. She craved more.
Unmoored, she tried to pull away. “I-I am in comfort now.”
“Good.” Crouching, he released one ankle chain. “I like your phrasings. You make my language sound a lot prettier than it is.”
A swell of something unfamiliar. Pride. It hadn’t been easy to learn the Other language. No one in her pack spoke it as well as she. They thought it was beneath them to learn. She’d had no choice. Not if she wanted to survive trading with the Others and save her people. “Th-thank you.”
That single word seemed to push him over the edge.
He shot back to standing, looming above. “Fuck protocol. Everyone should have a name. Choose one.”
Her startled gaze flew to his. “A name only for those who—"
“Choose or I’ll do it for you.” His voice snapped with command.
“Why you do this?” She might have been trained to obey without question, but she’d always had rebellious thoughts running through her mind, and for once, here with a non-pack-member, she would find the courage to voice them.
“Maybe it’s just what we savages do.”
In truth, she had always wanted a name. She’d given Sharluff one in a show of defiance and with the secret wish that, like her ostracized pet, she would one rotation have someone defy the curse and call her something besides Gazi. See her as something besides an abomination. After touch, after acceptance, it had been her greatest longing.
How strange that, like so many wishes she’d never voiced out loud, her captor would end up being the one to provide her with it.
“Decide.”
A far-off memory prodded her mind. “In…in early seasons” the image flickered and solidified, “the sister of my birth-bearer give me name Nayla. A secret between