The Knight, Death, and the Devil

Chapter 13: No One Likes A Cheat

Torin lay in bed, examining the piping snaking across the bedroom ceiling. His hand ran up and down the thin arm stretched over his body, as if the Togruta would disappear if he didn't continuously remind himself that she were there.

Hours passed as they lay in bed, but time had done little to reduce the sweltering heat in the metal belly of the sandcrawler. It was late enough that the sun must have been growing low in the sky, but Leda and her crew had simply taken that as an opportunity to conserve fuel by shutting down the fans cooling the interior—the scavengers were nothing if not stingy.

"How long will you follow her?"

Despite being intimately aware of the woman pressed up against him, the question caught him off-guard.

"Who?"

"You know who." She met his gaze with one of unwavering intensity, demanding an answer. Freed from the twin shackles of a strict master and a hostage sister, her personality had changed at a speed that continued to surprise him. She was still the same young woman he'd fallen for the moment their eyes had first met, but he was quickly realizing that there was a depth to her he hadn't known. Perhaps that was not entirely his fault—as a slave, feigned obedience was her only line of defense.

Unable to search his own mind with those deep blue eyes sucking him in, he turned his head back towards the ceiling and chewed on his lip. There had been practical reasons he hadn't tried to run from Vathamma, chief of all being the woman lying beside him in bed. Now, that was no longer a concern. Once they were off this planet, they could slip away at any starport and disappear together.

"Before, you asked me to run. Now, we can run." She brought a hand up to his chest and traced circles around it.

"To where, though?" He asked, taking her hand in his own. "The Republic won't take me back. The Empire definitely won't."

"Anywhere!" She exclaimed. "You can be anyone, do anything ."

He frowned. "I don't want to be just anyone. " Extending a hand to the foot of the bed, he reached out with his mind and drew the covers up over the two of them. " This is me. I want to learn more about this. "

"It doesn't have to be her. There are others—"

"The Jedi?" He shot back. "Please. One nearly killed me yesterday."

"So you are... what, using her?" Throwing off the covers, Nomi sat up in bed and twisted around to face him.

He didn't like how manipulative that sounded, and he couldn't even say his motives were that deliberate. It was more like his Master was a planet, and he some passing asteroid that got caught up in her orbit. He'd never said it aloud, but he'd come to think of it as fate that they'd met on that battlefield. Was it the Force, working its mysterious ways? Or was he just allowing himself to get dragged along by a will that overshadowed his own?

"It's complicated." The words sounded even less convincing aloud.

She lowered her eyebrows into an intense glare.

"Do not tell me you are in love with her."

"Gods, no!" He could truly say that he'd never thought of her like that. She was beautiful, in a ferocious sort of way—any man could recognize that—but he admired her beauty in the detached manner one would a lavish art piece that would kill you for staring at it too long.

She narrowed her eyes further and he swallowed the lump in his throat.

"Good." Her head fell onto his chest, one of her tentacles laid across his neck and her horn tickling his nose. "I would not want to share—"