Page 73 of Orc’s Hex

This is not the antechamber—not the first kiss, fast and necessary, not the second, hard and urgent with both of us about to walk into a room that might have killed him. This is slow. Patient. He kisses me like he has time and intends to use it, and his hands are in my hair and I don’t stop.

“You’re still covered in the crypt.”

“So are you.”

“Yes.”

He pulls back enough to look at me.

The firelight catches the old scar at his collar where his shirt has shifted, the openness he lets through that he would have controlled three weeks ago. I don’t look away.

He starts with my coat.

He removes it with the same deliberateness he brings to everything—each button, each layer, nothing rushed. His hands are large and careful and he has been using them to fight and hold and bleed tonight and now he is using them for this.

“Your shoulder.” There’s a cut I hadn’t noticed.

“I didn’t feel it.”

“You never notice your own⁠—“

“I notice other people’s.”

“I noticed.” He looks at the cut, then at me, with the dry look he gets when he’s said what he considers obvious and is waiting to see if I understand it means more than it sounds.

He noticed my hit from the walkway in the courtyard. He’s been noticing my damage since I arrived.

I’ve been doing the same.

He cleans the cut without being asked. His hands are steady and warm and I watch his face while he works—the focused attention he gives everything, aimed at this—and the Bondmark on my wrist is quiet, no mechanism in it, no pressure, no grief running through the channel.

Just this.

When he’s done he looks up at me and I take the cloth from his hands and set it aside and I pull him down to me.

He comes.

The firelight shifts. His hands are everywhere and they are warm and real and he touches me like he intends to, like everything he does—no performance, no uncertainty, full presence. He is very large and he is very careful with it and at a certain point the careful breaks because I pull at him and he responds accordingly and the chamber is warm and the stone outside is cold and we are on the other side and we have chosen this and the Bondmark is warm and quiet and there is nothing else in the room.

Later.

He pulls me against his side. His arm across my back. My head on his chest, careful of the bandaged cut. I can hear his heartbeat—steady, even in this.

The fire has gone lower.

“Brynna is going to come looking for you.”

“Let her.”

I put my hand against his chest, below the bandage, where his heart is.

No curse.

No pressure. No mechanism. No hallucination trying to show me as a threat.

Just his heartbeat under my hand.

“The crack in the east wall is going to need your Forge Quarter masons.”