ChapterSixteen
“Explainto me why this conference is so important to you.”
Atria curled her fingers over the sloped edge of the counter, trying to anchor herself after the whiplash of going from mind-shattering orgasm toback to business as usualKaz. Endorphins made her head feel too full, her limbs too loose, to handle that sort of intensity one moment and brusqueness the second.
Dazed, she said, “I’m— what? Explain what?”
Kaz, acting as though he hadn’t just had his tongue between her legs and made half a dozen promises to fuck her sideways a minute ago, gave her alookbefore he reminded her, “Why you need to go to this conference so badly.”
Atria blinked several times as she fought to get her brain back in working order. “It’s the culmination of my life’s work. It might wipe out the use of m-siphons and destroy the feyrunning industry. Isn’t that enough?”
“No.” Picking up the sachet of ointment like it was the most natural thing in the world, he leaned in close to inspect her aching cheek.
Though his face was flushed, his lips a touch swollen, he still looked terrifying when he frowned. Kaz’s scowl was deep enough to groove lines around his mouth when he used a knuckle to gently turn her face into the light. “I get that it’s a big deal, but there’s no reason it has to be announcedright now.What difference does a week, a month, even a year make? Especially when the risk of rushing things is your life?”
That was the bit she had trouble grasping.
For all that she’d had a strange upbringing, Atria considered herself a normal witch. She put herself through school. She had a good job. She had an admittedly tiny but close-knit social circle.
Sometimes she indulged in a movie at the old fashioned theatre by her apartment. She and Ruby had even been talking about a vacation somewhere sunny after their big announcement. Her life wasnormal.
Normal people didn’t have bounties put on their heads. Normal people did not have their lives threatened. Normal people were not kidnapped for their own protection, or whisked away by the leaders of territories.
For godssakes, she was on aworktrip!
But the facts were quite literally staring her in the face. No matter how normal she was, Atria had to accept that she was stuck in an extraordinary situation. She couldn’t care less about the danger to herself, but when she thought of Ruby on her own in Las Vegas, she felt the cold drip of fear down her spine.
She swallowed thickly as Kaz began to smear the ointment on the split in her cheek. “I know it sounds insane,” she began, biting back a wince, “but this is— this iseverythingto me. My whole life. My purpose. It’s what I’ve dedicated myself to. Being so close and then having it ripped away from me is like—Ow!”
Kaz was so focused on getting the ointment into the cut that he hadn’t minded the claw at the end of his index finger. It scraped the delicate skin just below her eye, leaving a stinging trail in its wake.
The orc jerked his hand back like he’d been burned. “Shit,” he hissed, grasping her chin. He once more angled her head up and to the light, this time to inspect his own handiwork.
Squeezing her eyes shut reflexively, Atria blindly held out her hand between them. “Just give me the thing. I appreciate the help and… the rest of it, but I’d rather not have those claws near my eyeballs anymore.”
Kaz released her chin. She opened her eyes and expected to find him handing over the sachet, but instead she was treated to the sight of him peeling off his leather gloves.
“This is why I never wear these damn things,” he muttered.
Atria opened her mouth to ask him what he thought the gloves had to do with it, considering he would still have clawsunderneaththem, but the question died on her tongue. Her eyes widened. They locked on the skin he revealed before they darted away to land on a faint smudge by the door jamb over his shoulder.
Her heart jammed into her throat with an awful, sickening jolt.
His hands, huge and long-fingered, with hard, scarred knuckles and strong tendons, were dark with the natural orcish pigment they calledkohl.Orcs didn’t take marriage sigils like witches and arrants did, since the kohl worked well enough. It was the orcish sign forback off, this one’s taken!
Atria felt suddenly ill.
Oh gods, he’s mated. What did I do?
Logically, she knew that he was a consenting adult and that what they’d just done was as much his choice as hers, and therefore any consequence on his end was just that —hisproblem. She had no idea he’d taken the kohl, or else she never,everwould have let him kiss her, let alone… Atria’s stomach turned, effectively souring what little remained of her rosy, post-orgasm glow.
There was no reason for her to feel clammy, nor for her stomach to twist into hard knots of jealousy and disgust. How could she have known that he was mated to someone else?
I must have been wrong about the lust,she thought, feeling a scalding flush of shame creep up her chest and neck.
It wasn’t that the lust didn’t exist. Obviously it did. They’d shared the single most erotic moment of her life, and shecertainlywasn’t the only one to get pleasure out of it. However, she assumed his lust was directed ather.There was every possibility that Kaz’s roaring tide of desire was completely unrelated to her presence. Maybe it was just his default state. Maybe he was a man with a perpetual hard-on who thought nothing of going down on needy empaths.
She couldn’t pretend to know how every being’s mating worked. There was a chance that he and his partner had an open relationship, or perhaps he had a multiple mate situation. That wasn’t unheard of, though she couldn’t recall a specific case involving an orc in that moment. More realistically, it was possible he and his mate were separated. Maybe they were no longer living.
