Page 72 of Orc’s Hex

Thirty years of Drazhul Xorn and now this.

Drazhul’s hand finds mine at the parapet rail.

No ceremony. Just his fingers closing over mine, his thumb running across my knuckles, looking at the valley.

DRAZHUL

He asks her once.

They have come down from the ramparts, past the garrison quarters where Brynna is still working, through the main corridor where two of his warriors stop and look at him with expressions he will need to address in the morning—gratitude and relief wearing the faces of people who have been afraid for a very long time and are only beginning to understand that the fear is done. He nods to them. He keeps walking.

At the door to his private chambers he stops and looks at her.

She meets his gaze.

“Yes.” Before he has asked it.

He opens the door.

ZIVA

His chambers are exactly as they were on the first morning—stone walls, iron hooks, the fireplace burning—but the room is different and he is different and being in this room with him is different.

The urgency is gone.

Not the wanting—the wanting is very much present, has been present since somewhere in the first week when I stopped being able to pretend otherwise, and his eyes on my face across his chambers have something in them I don’t have a professional category for. I’m not sure what I am to him now. Something he chose. That is sufficient.

But the urgency is gone.

The first time, in the antechamber and the crypt, was because we might not have had another side. The after was uncertain.

This is the after.

He comes to me slowly.

Not cautiously—there is nothing cautious about Drazhul Xorn—but slowly, the whole evening behind him. His hands find my face as they have since we came out of the mountain, and he looks at me in the firelight.

The scar at his chest is freshly bandaged.

I put my hand over it, over the dressing, over the cut he made without hesitation to flood the channels with his blood.

He covers my hand with his.

“Does it hurt.”

“Yes.”

“Brynna—“

“Brynna treated it.” His thumb moves across my hand. “I’ve had worse.”

Of course he has.

He leans down and puts his mouth against my temple. Breath and warmth, the deliberate contact of someone who has decided where you are and is making that physical.

I tip my head up.

He finds my mouth.