Da hadn’t protected me. He’d barely been able to take care of himself. If I’d been a good daughter, I would have stayed. Practically speaking, I couldn’t have saved him. He’d been lost even before my mother’s death, succumbing to whatever demons plagued him.
He’d tried to be a good father.
I take a deep breath, and let my guilt go.
A twig cracks and I stiffen, whipping my blade out as I step back, prepared to defend my cabin and my apprentice sleeping inside.
It's a vague outline in the darkness, but the outline is tall, broad, too still to be honest.
“Who's there?” I growl in guttural Uthilsuven. “Turn away or meet my blade.”
“That’s the greeting you’d give an enemy,” arough, masculine voice purrs. “Not a husband. I suppose I approve.”
I should have taken Maezii and left. I straighten, lowering my blade. It won’t do anything but piss him off; he won’t be caught off guard a second time.
“Have you learned how to use your nail file yet, Kyona Lethergen, or are you still tripping over your own feet and almost slicing your throat open?”
“The last time we saw each other, it was your guts sliced open.”
Hells, I shouldn’t be flirting with him.
He chuckles. I tense, but don’t move. Running would be worse than stupid, and I don’t have a pure blooded Human’s instinct to offer myself as prey.
Rathhur steps out of the shadows, pace steady, moonlight through the trees briefly highlighting his face. “What have I told you about pointing a knife at an enemy if you don't plan to follow through?”
“What makes you think I won’t follow through?”
“You sheathed it.”
Because I don’t want him to disarm me and refuse to give it back.
He's an arm’s length from me now, the first step on the porch creaking under his weight, and there's no light from inside the cabin to illuminate his features even a little. My night vision isn't as sharp as a full Uthilsen.
I clench down on the urge to run, holding my ground. Everything in me shrieks that a predatorapproaches, not the merely dangerous boy I knew.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” I say. “I’ve written out a deed to the cabin and its contents, and the rights to the pond. Take it if you think I owe you something and let any debt between us be settled.”
“I don’t need a deed to claim what’s already ours, Ky’a. I’ve kept it maintained. Da died clean and well fed in his bed.”
It’s not a good death to an Orc warrior, but to me—tears prick my eyes. “Thank you.”
“You never need to thank me.”
His soft voice, the caress in it, doesn’t fool me. It’s the voice he learned to use when we were youths and Rath didn’t want his drunk, vicious father to know that half our daydreams were about sneaking into his bedroom at night and slitting his throat before he could beat Rath again, or order him to show me that same kindness.
Poor Rathhur, torn between the parents he loved, the community he felt responsible for, and the halfling used by his mother to vent her hatred of anything Human.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Want, Ky’a?”
His voice is even, quiet. He still hasn’t moved but as the seconds tick by it’s as if his shadow stretches out and looms over me.
My skin crawls from the tension. He’s learned control. Before, he would have already had me pinned against the door, his tusks scraping my neck or his hand around my throat. An endless cycle of kindness and cruelty, depending on who was watching.
“I want my wife to fulfill the oath we made, in blood, before witnesses. I want to leave this hell of a half life.” His voice deepens. “I want more than to return home to be told she plans to flee me again.”
“I came back to settle Da’s affairs.”
