Page 18 of Orc’s Hex

He cuts his arm—short, clean, no hesitation—and drives himself back against the stone wall to press the gash against it. The impact is hard. I hear something give under the force of it. Blood on the basalt. Three floors below, the foundation makes a sound I feel in my sternum rather than my ears. A concussive groan, and then the pressure in the room drops.

His hand leaves my throat.

He steps back. One step, controlled. His breathing is steady. His eyes are on me with a focus that has nothing fractured in it at all.

I stay against the wall.

The room is quiet except for the fire.

I look at his arm. The cut is already slowing—orc healing doing what it does. He hasn’t moved to wrap it. He won’t.

“Are you hurt.” Fully present, no fracture, focused entirely on my face.

“No.”

“I should⁠—“

“Don’t.” I push off the wall. “The mechanism has been operating on you your entire life. You don’t owe me an apology for it.”

He goes very still.

How many times has he apologized for it. How many people has he watched leave and taken it personally when it was never his to carry.

I cross the room to the water basin on the sideboard. Wet a cloth, walk it back, hold it out. He looks at it for a moment. Takes it. Presses it to the cut without making anything of the gesture, and I don’t either.

“What you did. When you told me to look at you. You didn’t move.”

“No.”

“Most people⁠—“

“I’m not most people.”

He’s looking at me the way you look at something you weren’t expecting and have no framework for, and can’t stop looking at anyway.

I’ve been not entirely thinking about that look for two days. I’m less successful at not thinking about it from six inches away.

“You needed something realer than what the curse was showing you. That was me.”

“Is it.”

The question lands somewhere below professional.

“Usually,” I say, and I mean it as a deflection and it doesn’t land like one.

He doesn’t look away. Neither do I.

The fire pops. Outside the window the mountain has gone from gray to the first bruised edge of dawn.

I feel it before I see it—the heat arriving even as his hand left my throat, the burn already present when I pushed off the wall. I’d registered it then and set it aside, because the more urgent problem was making sure he could see the room clearly. Now I look.

I push back my sleeve.

On the inside of my wrist, exactly where Blood Law tradition places a Bondmark, a line is burning itself into my skin. No damage. No blistering. Just the heat of inscription and the permanence of a thing that has already decided it exists regardless of whether I agreed to it.

I stare at it.

“Drazhul.”