Milena couldn’t help it—his presence pressed on her until she was aware of him no matter how she tried not to be. At last she muttered under her breath:
“I mean, who knew he’d clamp his mouth shut that hard. If he doesn’t like how this is going, should I go suggest he just torture him himself?”
“…It’s not that he doesn’t like that.”
“Pardon?”
As if something had clicked, Siobhan stopped short of lighting his cigarette and tapped Milena lightly on the head.
“It’ll be evening soon. Go on ahead and eat.”
“What about you, Underboss?”
“Later.”
Truth be told, he hadn’t planned to eat dinner today, but Siobhan hid it as usual and added:
“While you’re at it, take the human guest to the galley too.”
“Eh…?”
Needless to say, Milena’s face twisted into a bizarre shape—and for the first time the man with the dark eyes chewing his mouthpiece reacted in a way that counted.
“What, take that human to the galley? What if she causes a scene again…?”
“With the wounds she took last night not all healed, she won’t do anything reckless. Besides, Milio’s surely made food for that guest again anyway.”
Siobhan spoke as if it were nothing and glanced at Noce.
“That all right, Boss?”
“…Do as you like.”
It was the first time Noce had opened his mouth since coming down to the brig.
“Boss, too…”
Siobhan patted Milena’s shoulder when she hesitated with a complicated, delicate look.
“Kill two birds and lighten the load in your chest while you’re at it.”
“…I don’t have any such load.”
But she couldn’t hide the brief flicker across her face. In the end Milena stomped off first, leaving the brig.
And so only the wolf beastfolk, Siobhan, and Noce remained.
“So then.”
Siobhan finally lit the fresh cigarette he’d been holding and asked:
“What’s not going well, Boss?”
“…Siobhan.”
Hoo—. Noce let out smoke and said in a sunken voice:
“What does it mean when someone you spent a night with tells you, ‘It has nothing to do with you’?”
Ah, we’re screwed.
Siobhan thought it around his cigarette. He only thought it—he didn’t say it.
As the only one who knew what that human woman was to Noce, he approached with the greatest care.
“…Well, everyone has stories they don’t want to tell. And you and she haven’t known each other long, have you?”
“She doted herself sick over that mutt she met yesterday.”
Noce’s cold golden gaze cut to the wolf beastfolk. Even stripped of reason, the man must have felt the chill killing intent on him—the wolf’s hands twitched, and a rough clatter rang from the chains binding him.
Siobhan answered evenly.
“It’s only natural to worry the useful source might die before he talks. If you’d already gotten the information, that kind of worry wouldn’t exist.”
“…Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
Steady, weighty, and plain, Siobhan’s voice had persuasive force. Thanks to it, the gloomy pressure Noce had been laying over the brig eased a little.
“So I just need to kill that bastard?”
…Eased, my ass.
Siobhan rushed to speak toward Noce’s hand, which had drifted to the sword-hilt at his waist.
“Better than that—wouldn’t she be happier if you got the information she wants and delivered it to her?”
“Who knows.”
Noce sighed with a face carrying a faint trace of irritation.
“If she learns it, I feel like she’ll start scheming to run without a backward look.”
“…That is…”
“I don’t understand. Why insist on going back to a place where someone’s trying to kill you?”
In front of his most loyal and oldest subordinate, Noce spoke more than was his habit. Staring at smoke thinning into the air, he murmured:
“Is it that she just doesn’t like me…?”
“……”
“I tried to treat her well. I kindly told her she couldn’t escape, treated her, gave her my bed. It’s safer here than on land, where there are bastards who use some nasty poison—”
He didn’t finish. Noce’s killing eyes swung again to the wolf beastfolk.
Everything had been flowing nicely; it did seem the one who wrecked it all last night was, after all, that bastard.
“I should just kill him…”
“Before that, Boss—did you tell her how you feel?”
Siobhan cut in again, quickly. Noce tilted his head as if to ask what he was talking about.
“You can see it.”
Noce flicked the hand holding his cigarette.
The hem of the gaudy cloak draped on him and the ornaments on his body chimed with a delicate, ringing sound.
At that, Siobhan swallowed hard, sensing his worries realized.
“…So you’ve never actually said it in words.”
“Why bother, when you can see it?”
“Humans don’t know by seeing alone.”
“……?”
“They only know when you tell them.”
“……?”
Noce’s expression warped into something strange. Siobhan nodded like a man who’d reached enlightenment.
“It seems she doesn’t realize you’re courting her, Boss.”
“What—why…?”
“Because you haven’t said so…”
The focus vanished from Noce’s golden eyes under the shock.
Beastfolk court much as male animals do to females.
The strongest male in the pack has the right to approach the most beautiful female. He lingers at her side and circles, now and then pressing skin to skin, sharing and confirming each other’s scent.
To catch a female’s eye, the male adorns himself lavishly and shows off; giving up his comfortable nest or presenting food makes fine offerings.
When the female, lured, permits mating, only then are they joined.
But that is, after all, the beastfolk way.
“She allowed me her body…”
“She may have allowed you only her body.”
“Hah? Do humans’ hearts and bodies run separate?”
“I’ve heard that happens more often than you’d think.”
“…Then I—was I toyed with?”
“Conversely… she may have felt she was toyed with…”
“……”
The ember on the long pipe that had been left alone guttered and went out. Noce did not notice; he stood frozen where he was.
Siobhan swallowed a sigh.
Should I have given advice sooner?
For how he looks, Noce was much older than Siobhan. It felt ridiculous to meddle in the boss’s love life, and Siobhan had wrongly assumed that a man who’d waited so long for someone would, of course, work it out deftly.
In the beastfolk world the boss’s method wasn’t wrong either. I was complacent.
There wasn’t a soul on the ship who didn’t know Noce was courting that human woman. Even Milena, who carried elf blood and not beastfolk, had picked up the signs in the end.
Siobhan encouraged Noce gently, who still hadn’t crawled out of his shock.
“Even now, try talking again. Properly.”
“……”
Noce shut his eyes tight and opened them. Past the dead coal of his pipe, he looked down at his getup and let out a deflated sound.
It was the moment all the effort he’d put into grooming himself, following the beastfolk adage that the male who rises earliest claims the female, felt wasted.
“Because it has nothing to do with you.”
Hearing it blind to everything else, he had nearly lost hold of himself in that instant. Even knowing the woman before him was a patient, he’d wanted to seize her hard in his arms, to swallow the lips that had spit that hateful line. To press down that soft female body and wring from her only the sweet moans she’d spilled the night before.
What let him swallow the urge and turn away was the warning of the master who had once, when he was a mindless animal, beaten lessons into him without pity.
“Your power is a double-edged blade. Remember that it can protect the one you love—or wound them. …All the more if that other is human.”
Noce scrubbed his face with his hands. In his golden eyes, at a distance, the wolf beastfolk drooled again past the muzzle.
Yes. That was it. In the past he had been little different from that wolf.
And so he’d pressed her, all the more impatiently.
Who the hell is that mutt?
He knew that his only human was kind even to mindless beasts, not only to children small and weak.
Uneasy about whatever history might lie between her and that repulsive man…
A mess.
Noce’s gaze returned to the wolf beastfolk. As though looking at the culprit who had ruined everything, the eyes that had flashed savagely dulled to a flat light.
“Siobhan.”
“Yes.”
“Use any means. Find out everything there is to find out.”
If you want to work a knotted skein loose, you can only take patience in hand and rub at the snarled spot gently. Holding down the surge of killing intent, Noce gave the order:
“Even if he dies in the end, at least make him spit up enough to be a small gift for Aquila.”
“…Understood.”
Siobhan nodded, stolid as ever. As if that settled it, Noce climbed the steps and left the brig.
Watching the door close, Siobhan let out a long sigh.
Aquila, huh… An eagle?
It was an unfamiliar name, but by the circumstances it had to be the human’s. Though the tribe is long extinct, Siobhan too was a beastfolk who carried thick in his blood the line of the once-flourishing Bear Clan. Because of that, he could catch at once the old meaning nested in the name.