“Notallthe time. Where would be the fun in that?”
She huffed, but was secretly pleased.
He was right. As much as she found him to be irritating, pushy, and stubborn, Atria did like their push and pull. And she highly doubted that Kaz would do well with a woman who let him get away with his bullshit. A shrinking violet would be trampled, and while she didn’t count herself as an alpha anything, she was also not a woman to be squashed beneath a dominant man. She’d stand next to him or she wouldn’t stand with him at all.
Leaning back into him, Atria skimmed her palms over his forearms until she reached the tattooed band. A thoughtful sound escaped her as she traced the thick black line. “Can I ask about your tattoos?”
“You can ask me anything.”
She smiled and felt the warmth of the fire on her bunched cheeks. “Are they clan related or…”
“Clan tats,” he answered, stroking the notches of her ribs with his thumb. “Got them when I was sixteen.”
“In the EVP?”
“No, here. Well, this area. My mother’s family owns a large homestead several miles away.” He paused and then, in a quieter voice, continued, “I was sixteen when I first came here. I was struggling in San Francisco. I thought I could figure my shit out if I was around orcs. Like the source of my issues was orcish and not— I don’t know, my fucked up family.”
Atria’s blissful mood dimmed. Like everything else, Kaz approached the story with a detached sort of flatness, but she was so enmeshed in him that she felt the deep ache that reverberated with every word.
Not wanting to interrupt, she clutched his arms and nestled closer, offering wordless support. Warmth flowed from her and directly into him, untangling some of the old, gnarled emotions that weighed him down.
His sigh ruffled her hair. “Also, my mom was… She wasn’t doing well. My father never bonded to Amira like he should have. It takes months of regular, sustained contact to build a permanent pheromone bond — the kind that elves need to survive. Orcs aren’t too different. You don’t bond right, you leave town for months at a time… Orcs call it kohl sickness. Elves call it thepull.Same shit, same result when you fuck it up.”
As if to emphasize the point, Kaz buried his nose into her hair and took in a deep, shuddering breath. His voice was a little rougher when he continued, “It’s notexactlythe same, I guess. Elves have it way worse in a lot of ways. More intense. But orcs can die from separation just like elves can. Hormones stop working right, appetite vanishes, the body begins to shut down… Some folks can hold out just fine, but others wither away into nothing. And then they die.”
Atria glanced up at the mantel, where a diploma, a dried bunch of flowers, and several old paper photos of an orcish family sat. Did some of those faces look similar to Kaz? It was impossible to tell in the low light. “Your mother?”
“Took a while, but yeah. It got her.” He shook his head a little before he rested his chin on her crown. “We didn’t have a relationship before it set in. She was too traumatized by my father to handle raising me, so she gave me up to Delilah and Winnie right after I was born. And then one day when I was sixteen, I got a call from my grandparents, asking me to come stay for a while.”
Her heart ached for her poor half-orc. “And did you have a relationship with her after that?”
Kaz gave her middle a slight squeeze. “No.”
“Why? Why would you be invited just to—”
“She was dying.” He said it like he said everything else: matter-of-factly, dry, as if he didn’t feel those words like a knife blade sliding between his ribs.
No one else would have been able to sense how deep his pain went, but Atria could. Sheknew.
“Half the time she was awake, she wasn’t really lucid. I think she asked for me when she wasn’t thinking clearly. When I arrived, she could barely look at me. She didn’t want to talk. When shedid,it was because she thought I was Thaddeus.”
Atria’s horror mounted when Kaz whispered, “When she thought I was him, she used to beg me not to leave her.”
Her eyes and nose stung with tears. “Oh, Kaz…”
A soothing purr started up in his chest, almost as if he was attempting to soothe them both.
“I got the Rione clan tattoos because it was the one thing my mother asked me for. Not Thaddeus, butme.She wanted me to have them, so I let my grandfather take his bone needle to me for a week straight. It was the only time she looked at me like she wasn’t seeing a ghost.”
“That’s… that’s something, at least,” she whispered, stroking his skin even as she worked her psychic fingers through all that snarled emotion. She couldn’t — and wouldn’t — erase it, but she could ease the pain, distribute it so it was not so heavy a weight.
It was no great mystery why he tried to shove all his emotions down. If she carried that snarled mass of wounds, she would probably do the same thing.
“It’s something,” he agreed, a note of old bitterness in his tone. “And then two days after it was finished, she asked me to leave.”
Atria tried to turn around to look at him, but Kaz kept her anchored to his chest as if he couldn’t bear to face her. Craning her neck around as far as she could, Atria sputtered,“Excuse me?”
He rubbed the underside of his chin against the crown of her head, soothing a little of her agitation. “At the time it felt like the ultimate rejection. I’d tried everything to make her happy and fit in, but I failed. I was furious at myself and at her.”
