Page 165 of Seven Oars
Afterward, she sat against the wall with her legs drawn up, observing him pull on Phex’s shimmering defender shirt. It was wrong of him to wear it, which was probably his point.
“Why do you insist on wearing this shirt?” she asked.
“It’s a reminder of what I can do,” he said, confirming her guess.
“A reminder to Phex?”
“Him, too.”
“Are you jealous of him?” she murmured softly.
Fincros paused, and she was blasted by a cold draft of his displeasure. Without so much as a twitch of an eyebrow, he broadcast loud and clear that a boundary had been crossed.
Rosamma’s stomach did a small flip. She shouldn’t poke him.
She shouldn’t sleep with him, either, but Seven Oars was a warped world. It had absorbed her, and she didn’t recognize herself anymore.
“Jealous?” Fincros repeated the word, his voice tuning silken.“Tell me, what does Phex have that I don’t?”
He pointedly tucked in his shirt in efficient motions.
“He is a defender,” she pointed out, unreasonably stubborn.
“Not anymore,” he said.“Lost his status, just like his shirt.”
He carefully closed every fastening on the shirt’s neck.
Rosamma couldn’t shake the vague similarity between his tattoos and Phex’s, and the care he took to keep them covered.
She frowned.“You can lose the defender status?”
“You can, if you violate the defender tenets,” he said.“He violated a number of them.”
“Like what?”
“Like allowing himself to be captured by pirates. A stupid mistake. It was laughably easy to capture you.”
“We had no ammo!” she cried out, not a little incensed.
“That’s what’s laughable,” he countered.“He chose to fly a mission with no defense. No, scratch that—it’s not laughable, it's dumb.”
“He was ordered to! By his commander.”
Only now Rosamma was beginning to understand why Phex had been all out of sorts to fly them in the cruiser. He had understood the fallacy when the women had had no clue.
“That’s what he got for blindly following orders,” Fincros said, unsympathetic.“Killed his men, too.”
It was a brutal logic, one that Rosamma’s brain failed to grasp.
“He tried to defend us against all of you,” she grumbled.
Fincros only shook his head.“More like he acted out against us. And let’s not forget how, when he got himself trounced senseless, you, a female under his protection, came to his defense. Very much against the code. Did he not tell you to fuck off and stay put?”
“Sort of,” Rosamma admitted.“But I wouldn’t have listened. He had no one else at his back.”
Fincros made that deep throaty noise that left Rosamma weak in the knees.
“You almost lost your life with that bag on your head because of him,” he said with force.“Even with your energy, it took him too long to recover in time. Stupid, both of you.”
