The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate

Agnes held one finger to her lips.

He looked at her with wide, glassy eyes. His mouth opened. She shook her head once, firm, the headshake of a woman who had spent her life commanding rooms and was now applying that energy to commanding a seven-year-old’s silence.

He remained silent.

She grabbed a horseshoe nail from the edge of the platform. It was rusted, bent, discarded by a farrier who had been shoeing patrol horses in the square that afternoon. It was also thin enough to fit the pin mechanism on the pillory latch, because the universe, which had been punishing Agnes for the last four hours, had apparently decided to offer a single concession.

CLICK. The head hole released. CLICK. The left wrist. CLICK. The right.

The boy stumbled forward. His legs buckled immediately, his body folding toward the ground with the boneless collapse of a child whose muscles had been locked in a standing position for hours and had received the signal to stop and had stopped all at once. He couldn’t walk.

Agnes stared at him. The math was immediate and ugly: a boy who couldn’t walk was a boy who couldn’t run, and a boy who couldn’t run and was missing from a pillory was a second-time runner, and a second-time runner at seven years old with legs that didn’t work was a death sentence, and the death sentence was her fault because she had just freed him from the only thing keeping him alive until morning.

She did the most un-Agnes thing imaginable.

She picked him up.

He was light. Fifty pounds, maybe less. The ribs she felt through his shirt were pronounced enough to count, and the count made her jaw tighten in a way that had nothing to do with operational stress and everything to do with a fury she hadn’t known she carried, a fury at a compound where children were starved and pillored and whipped, a fury at a father who ran this place and called it management, a fury at herself for every year she had walked these streets and looked the other way because looking the other way was what Viremonts did.

She moved into the shadows as the rotation turned. She counted. The boots marched past. She pressed herself against the wall of a storage building, the boy against her chest, her arms shaking from the silver burns and the weight and the cumulative exhaustion of an evening that had included being backhanded, chained to a chair, picking two locks, navigating a secret passage, vomiting, scaling five stories of wall, eavesdropping on a plan to murder her mate, and freeing a child from a pillory.

The boy’s legs wrapped around her waist. His arms went around her neck. His head found the crook of her shoulder, and he settled there with the absolute, instinctive trust of a child who had decided that the person holding him was safety and was committing to the decision with his entire body.

He turned his face toward her ear. His voice was barely a whisper, small and raw and carrying the particular wonder of a child encountering something he had only heard about in stories.

"Are you an angel?"

Agnes swallowed. The swallow was hard, forced past a lump that had materialized in her throat without permission and was refusing to dissolve.

"The opposite, kid." Her voice came out rough. "I am the worst person you will ever meet. You are just having a very bad night, and your standards are low."

They waited. Two more guards marched past. Agnes counted the intervals. Moved. Stopped. Moved again. The compound was a grid, and the grid had gaps, and the gaps were her language, and the language was keeping them alive.

"Where do you live?" she whispered during a pause behind a water cistern.

"The Ashward," he said.

Agnes’s jaw tightened. The Ashward. The sector designated for slave orphans. Children with no family, no claim, no name that anyone recorded, housed in barracks that were cleaned quarterly and fed on a schedule that prioritized cost over nutrition. She had walked past the Ashward a thousand times. She had never walked through it.

She continued. Dodging. Hiding. The boy was shaking against her, full-body tremors that had nothing to do with cold and everything to do with a nervous system that had spent the last twelve hours in sustained terror and was only now, pressed against a stranger’s chest, allowing the terror to express itself.

She whispered to him. Off and on. Between stops. During the held-breath pauses when boots passed and shadows stretched and the margin between detection and escape was measured in inches.

"Breathe with me. In through the nose. Good. Again."

"You are doing well. You are doing better than most adults I know, and I know some very disappointing adults."

"We are almost through. Three more stops. Count them with me."

"Do you have any siblings here?" she asked during the longest pause, pressed against the back wall of the kitchens, listening to the rotation complete its circuit on the far side of the compound.

"No," he said. His voice was hollow and sad, the voice of a child who had been asked the question before and had given the answer before and understood that the answer closed doors rather than opening them.

"That means you are coming with me, then," Agnes stated. The sentence carried zero negotiation and zero hesitation and the full authority of a woman who had just made a decision and would burn this compound to the ground before she reversed it. "What’s your name?"

"Andrew. I have no family name."

"You do now," Agnes said, and she didn’t finish the sentence because the rotation was turning and they needed to move. But the sentence was a promise she intended to keep.

She moved. Three more stops.

The tree line was visible now, a dark wall of forest beyond the compound’s outer fence, and the fence was the last obstacle, and the last obstacle was a six-foot wooden barrier with a maintenance gap at the southeastern corner that she had identified at thirteen and had never told her father about because even at thirteen, some part of Agnes Viremont had been planning for the day she would need to leave this place and never come back.

They reached the gap. She shifted Andrew to one arm, pulled the loose board, and squeezed through sideways with the boy pressed against her chest and the board scraping her silver-burned wrists.

"Almost there."