“Make yourself comfortable,” he grunted, turning back around to where she stood, frozen and unable to breathe comfortably, by the steps. He frowned at her, but otherwise didn’t seem to notice her mounting distress.
Good.She didn’t want him to. It would be yet another thing to add onto the list of reasons she felt guilty.
Kaz cupped the side of her head and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her hair. “Do you have any special requests from the store?”
All she could manage was a quick shake of her head.
“No greasy things? Sweets?” When she only shook her head again, his frown deepened. Lines were carved between his heavy brows when he said, “Fine. I’ll be fast. Bedroom’s to the right, bathroom’s in the middle, and the kitchen is to the left. If you get hungry while I’m gone, eat whatever you want.”
Atria tried very hard not to blanch.
There was no way she could stomach a bite of that food. What if it was things Kaz’s mother had preserved herself? Not only would she be an intruder, but she’d be consuming something Kaz could never get back — something that was obviously precious to him, if he’d kept everything so pristine for however long it had been since his mother passed.
Atria felt Kaz’s scrutiny as he climbed the steps to leave, but she didn’t dare turn around to watch him go. She couldn’t even offer him a fake smile. She’d never been able to pretend well and never would. Empaths weren’t built for deception.
All she could do was hold on until the door closed, the locks reengaged, and the sounds of tires rolling over gravel faded into the distance.
Then, at last, she walked an unsteady path to the couch, sank onto its cushions, and cried.
ChapterThirty-Two
Kaz didn’t wantto leave her. He wanted to be in Montague even less.
It was a tiny town — barely even that. A single street stretched between two low, rolling hills, it sported a bar, an animal feed shop, and a combined post office, grocery store, and notary.
Those few who worked in the businesses lived in a handful of sturdy homes on the street, but everyone else lived in homesteads like the one his mother had left him. Orcs were community-focused but also tended to be a self-sufficient lot. The ones who chose the homestead life were not usually people who craved new dining experiences every week, nor the luxury of filling up a cart at a big box store.
If they wanted something, they could simply ask a neighbor or use the Iron Chain-provided high speed universal wifi to order it to their post office-grocery-store-notary. Kaz knew these people and their habits, even the tiny little town itself, because he’d spent two years desperately trying to fit in with them.
Stupid.He should have known better than to try.
But then, maybe he always knew. It was pure stubbornness that made him try anyway, even knowing that he was too elvish for these people to ever really accept him.
Orcs and elves hadn’t officially gone to war against one another in a thousand years. Things had been pretty even for millennia — elves took a chunk of territory, orcs lost some; elves lost, orcs gained; empires rise, empires fall — but when orcs began to pull ever larger amounts of iron from the earth, forging weapons that could kill a full-grown, healthy elf with one cut… Well, things took a turn.
That single quirk of biology, that elvish reaction to iron, combined with the natural orcish urge to pull from the earth, led directly to Kaz’s own birth.
Numbers dwindling, elves sued for peace and lost a majority of their power in the process. Then they fled across the Atlantic, set down laws to forbid elves from taking Others as their consorts to bolster their numbers, and rebuilt their power in a new, modern age. The Metallurgic Inoculation was invented, saving countless elvish lives by mitigating the elvish reaction to iron, and that biological quirk was at last defeated.
And then Thaddeus happened, and the Great War that turned everyone against each other again. Born after the Peace Charter was signed, Kaz had lived in a calm age his entire life.
That didn’t mean hostilities died completely, nor that he felt accepted completely on either side, though. At least with the elves, he knew where he stood. If they didn’t like him, they’d immediately make it clear with claw or fang.
Orcs, on the other hand, had developed an intricate system of social hierarchy he found impossible to navigate. Every conversation was a test he failed. He couldn’t make friends because he didn’t understand the nuances of the social fabric that dominated their lives. The wrong kind of look, forgetting to properly greet someone, giving the wrong gift — any and all of it might mark you as an outsider.
Not all orcs were like that, of course. No culture was a monolith, and orcs hailed from every corner of the world. Customs and attitudes varied widely.
Perhaps Kaz might have had more success fitting in with other orcs in other, less insular communities. It was just his luck that he never stood a chance in Montague.
At least he knew this for certain: they didn’t hate him because his father was an elf. He doubted many of them knew that, though some certainly suspected it. The people of Montague initially disliked him because they found him to be unsociable, aggressive, and an outsider uninterested in conforming to their expectations. That opinion solidified into outright disgust when his mother died.
Like elves, orcs considered family loyalty important above all other things. In the eyes of Montague’s community, Kaz had committed the worst possible sin: abandoning his mother on her deathbed.
As he learned at her funeral, there would never be any recovery from that.
Get in, get out.Kaz repeated those four words to himself over and over as he blazed through the selection of prepackaged foods, vegetables, and snacks in Sal’s grocery store. Strangers passing through was not unusual, so no one looked askance at him as they did their own shopping, but if they looked any closer, there was a possibility they might recognize him.Thatwas something he wished to avoid at all costs.
The chances were slim, though. It had been two decades since he last stepped foot in town, and with his tattoos covered by his zipped jacket, they wouldn’t be able to immediately clock him as the chieftain’s grandson.
