Page 55 of Orc’s Hex

“And if it works.”

“The curse is gone. The sigil dissolves. The Bondmark settles into what it’s supposed to be—a Blood Law mating mark between two people, not a curse target.”

A beat.

“And whatever is on the other side of that,” he says, low, “we meet it without three hundred years of interference.”

Not about the ritual.

I look at him in the dark and the thing I have been not naming is right there in my chest, clear as the cold pressing against my back, and I am done pretending I don’t know what it is.

“Yes. Whatever is on the other side, we meet it.”

He holds my gaze for one beat—two—and then nods, once.

I prepare the antechamber perimeter while he watches.

Chalk marks on the arch, three layers—absorption, redirection, containment. The first two are protective. The third is to keep the consolidated curse inside the circle if the reversal falters, so it has nowhere to go except back into the sigil’s origin point, where it will destroy itself rather than him. I’m not going to need the third layer. I’m putting it there anyway.

He doesn’t ask what I’m doing. He watches my hands in the torchlight and he doesn’t ask.

He let me put protective marks on his arms in the Blood Archive and he didn’t ask then either. He just watched my hands. He trusts my hands the way I trust his—completely, without deciding to.

I mix the absorption medium and reach for his sleeve.

“Your arm.”

He comes to me.

Three paces, and now we’re in the confined space of the antechamber entrance. I push his sleeve back—over the strapping Brynna put on his ribs, still in place—and I paint the absorption pattern on his forearm with two fingers, working from the wrist to the elbow. His eyes are on my face the entire time.

I don’t look up.

I take longer than the pattern requires.

I know this while I’m doing it—the geometry only needs a certain precision, and I’m giving it more than that, tracing each line with a slowness that has stopped being purely professional somewhere in the last thirty seconds. His skin is warm under my fingers, warmer than the antechamber’s cold should allow, and I can feel his pulse where my fingers cross his wrist—steady, deliberately steady, a man holding himself in check.

Neither of us says anything while I finish the line.

The torch throws long shadows against the antechamber walls, and somewhere below us the Foundation Crypt is waiting with three centuries of grievance in its floor, and neither of us is thinking about that right now. I am thinking about the size of his hand, still and open on the stone beside me. I am thinking about how close his face is in this narrow space—close enough that I can feel the warmth of him in the cold passageway, close enough that if either of us leaned we wouldn’t have to lean far.

I don’t lean.

He doesn’t either.

But I feel the decision sitting in the room with us anyway—unmade, not yet spoken, both of us choosing, deliberately, second by second, to finish the work first.

I finish the pattern. My fingers linger at his elbow a half-second longer than the geometry requires.

“This channels what I pull out of the stone through your bloodline oath. It’ll heat.”

“I know.”

“You’ll feel the consolidation starting about thirty seconds after I begin. Before the hallucinations hit⁠—“

“I know what they’ll do.” Even. “I’ve been managing them for a hundred and sixty-five years. I know exactly what they’ll throw at me.”

I look up then.