Page 17 of Orc’s Hex

He was worried. Not about the investigation. About me.

I don’t know what to do with that so I move on.

“One more thing.” I step toward him. Not closing the gap entirely, but enough that the fire’s warmth is at my back and his is the only face I have in front of me. “The chest sigil. I need to see where it connects to the foundation—there’s a distribution channel in the core inscription I need to match against the carving. Thirty seconds.”

“Now.”

“Now.”

He opens his collar without being asked. Two buttons. The firelight catches the carved lines of the chest sigil—deeper than it reads in daylight, the channels dark in a way that isn’t quite shadow.

I look at it for exactly as long as the work requires and not one second longer.

That’s a lie I tell myself for about two seconds before I abandon it. He is standing very close, collar open, firelight doing something unfair to the line of his throat, and I am supposed to be reading a curse inscription and instead I am cataloging how his breathing has changed since I stepped toward the fire—not faster, just more deliberate, the breathing of a man doing the same thing I’m doing, which is not looking at something he’s decided not to look at.

I reach up.

Not to the sigil. To his jaw—to angle his face into the full firelight, because the upper border of the carving needs more than a grate fire to read clearly and I need to see it.

My fingers press against his cheek, angling his face into the light.

For one full second, nothing happens. His skin is warm under my fingers, warmer than the fire alone accounts for, and his eyes on mine have stopped pretending this is only about the inscription. I feel his pulse jump under my palm—once, sharp—and some part of me that has nothing to do with curse-work notices it and files it away with a carefulness I don’t examine.

The room detonates.

Not the walls, not the fire—nothing that moves or sounds. The air between us goes from cold stone to electric and violent in less than a second, and Drazhul moves.

Fast.

Faster than I’d anticipated even knowing what the curse can do. My back hits the wall. His hand closes around my throat.

Not crushing. Present. His palm and fingers cover my throat wall to wall—warm, dry, not tightening. But there. Impossible to ignore.

Six inches between his face and mine.

His eyes have fractured.

I know it because I’ve been watching for it. He’s looking at me and not looking at me at the same time. Whatever the curse is showing him, it isn’t what’s in this room.

Don’t fight it. Don’t pull away. Make him see you.

I don’t go for the blade at my hip. I don’t try to break the grip. I wrap my hand around his wrist—not to pry it loose, just to be there, my fingers pressed over his pulse—and I hold his fractured gaze and I say it.

“Look at me.”

Not loud. Level.

His hand doesn’t move. But I can see him working behind the fracture—see the cost of it, what it takes to hold both versions of the room simultaneously and insist on one. A hundred and sixty-five years of that, with nothing but will. And he’s winning.

“Drazhul.”

His eyes find mine.

Mine, not the curse’s version. I watch the fracture recede—jagged, the curse fighting him back because this room is smaller and the proximity is closer and the thing in the foundation knows it.

He reaches for the knife at his belt.

I don’t move.