No. It isn’t. The storm still rages overhead. The cold is still eating into my bones. And somewhere in the water behind me, I can feel them watching.
The drowned.
I push myself to my knees, then my feet. The ankle screams but holds. Above me, torchlight flickers against black walls—massive walls, stretching up and up until they disappear into the storm. A fortress carved into the cliff face, its stones so dark, they seem to drink the lightning.
Shouting. Multiple voices, barely audible over the wind and waves.
I try to call out. Manage a croak that wouldn’t carry three feet, let alone the fifty between me and whoever’s up there. My legs decide standing is overrated and I drop to my knees again, the impact jarring through my twisted ankle with enough force to blur my vision.
Don’t pass out. If you pass out, you die.
Boots on stone. Someone’s coming. I reach for my knives—still at my belt, miracle of miracles—and find my fingers too numb to grip them. Perfect. Just perfect. Survived a shipwreck and a monster-infested reef only to be murdered by whoever’s manning this particular piece of nowhere.
A figure emerges from the rain. And I forget how to breathe.
He’s massive. Easily the largest person I’ve ever seen, towering over my kneeling form with shoulders broad enough to block the wind. The torchlight catches his skin—gray-green, weathered, marked with scars that tell stories I don’t want to read. His arms are thick with muscle, his hands rough with calluses visible even in the dim light.
An orc.
I’ve seen orcs before. The Saltmere docks aren’t picky about who loads cargo, and there’s good money in work that requires strength humans can’t match. But I’ve never seen onequite this... present. He fills the space around him, his stance balanced, his attention absolute. Every inch of him radiates danger the way a blade radiates sharpness.
His face is hard-planed and brutal—jaw set, expression somewhere between assessment and threat. Eyes the color of thunderheads before they break. Hair black as the water that tried to kill me, hanging in braids threaded with gold beads. One of his tusks is chipped, the break speaking to violence I’d rather not imagine.
He looks at me the way a predator looks at something too small to be worth killing. Curiosity edged with dismissal.
“You came through the Wrecktide.” His voice is gravelly and scratchy, deep enough to vibrate in my chest. Not a question. Statement of fact, delivered with the flat certainty of someone who’s seen this before. “No one comes through the Wrecktide.”
“Tell that to the ship I was on.” I cough, taste blood, spit it onto the stone. “What’s left of it.”
His attention sharpens. Those pale eyes drop from my face to my hand—to the pouch I didn’t realize I was clutching. Recognition flickers across his features. Then something darker, something that makes the hair rise on the back of my neck.
“What’s in the bag, thief?”
The word hits harder than the waves. Thief. He knows. Somehow, this orc standing in the middle of nowhere, guardian of a fortress I’ve never heard of, knows exactly what I’m carrying.
My fingers tighten on the leather. Every survival instinct screams at me to lie—play innocent, spin a story, talk my way out of whatever this is. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. Half the reason I’m still alive is my ability to convince people I’m exactly what they want to see.
But I’m exhausted. Half-drowned. The curse is singing in my blood, making me reckless. And there’s something in this orc’s stance that suggests lying would be more perilous than truth.
“Gold.” The word comes out rough, broken. “The kind that kills people.”
He goes very still. The kind of stillness that precedes violence.
“You want to take it from me,” I continue, because apparently near-death experiences have destroyed what little self-preservation I had left, “you’ll have to kill me first. Fair warning—others have tried.”
A beat of silence. The rain hammers down. The wind screams. And the orc just watches me, his expression unreadable, his massive frame motionless.
Then he moves. Not toward me—toward the fortress wall, his hand finding a torch bracket I hadn’t noticed. He wrenches it aside, revealing a gap in the stone just wide enough for a person to slip through.
“Inside. Now.”
“Is that an order or an invitation?”
“It’s a warning.” His attention flicks past me, toward the water I crawled out of. “They followed you here.”
They.
Ice slides down my spine that has nothing to do with the cold. I turn, slowly, dreading what I’ll see.
