Chapter 8
Verity became a ghost.
It was not a conscious decision. She did not wake on the morning after her tea with Delia and think:Today I will begin a systematic campaign of avoiding the Warchief of the Mountain Clan.
She simply... adjusted her routines.
She rose earlier and took the back stairs to the archives, the ones that creaked and smelled of damp stone but did not pass the great hall or the training yard or any of the common spaces where she might encounter—
Anyone. She might encounter anyone. This was not specifically about him.
She ate at odd hours. Very early, when only the kitchen staff were awake, or very late, after the evening meal had concluded and the great hall had emptied. Kira gave her strange looks but said nothing. The food was just as good cold.
She kept to the archives.
This part, at least, was not a change. She had been keeping to the archives since she arrived. The only difference now was the quality of her attention. Sharper, more focused, more determinedly fixed on the documents in front of her rather than the memory of dark green skin gleaming with sweat, of iron-colored eyes finding her across a crowded space, of that slow tilt of his jaw, the one that said he already knew what she was thinking—
Stop it.
She was here for the archives. For the centuries of orc documentation that would rewrite half of what the Royal Archive thought it knew.
She was here for Corvin. For answers.
She was not here to develop inconvenient physical responses to an orc warchief who could apparently smell every flutter of her pulse.
The work helped. Varresh's web continued to reveal itself in fragments, and Verity lost herself in the pleasure of meaning emerging from apparent chaos. She found a cluster of documents related to border patrols from twelve years ago. Not the right timeframe, but close. She found references to Thornfield Pass in a trade dispute from two decades back. She found the edges of the shape she was looking for, and the hunt consumed her, drove everything else from her mind.
Almost everything.
At night, alone in her narrow bed, her thoughts betrayed her.
She'd be reviewing the day's discoveries, cataloguing connections, planning tomorrow's approach, and then, without warning, she would see Targesh's bare chest. The scar that slashed diagonal across his ribs. The way the muscles of his back had shifted when he pivoted. The dark trail of hair descending from his navel.
He could smell you wanting him.
She pressed her face into her pillow and willed herself to sleep.
The strategy worked for nearly two days.
On the evening of the second day, Verity was deep in the third archive room when she heard footsteps on the stairs.
Her breath came short, one sharp catch she couldn't quite control.
Perhaps he's going somewhere else. Perhaps he's simply passing through. Perhaps—
The footsteps stopped at the doorway.
"You have been hiding." Targesh's voice filled the small stone room.
Verity did not look up. She kept her eyes fixed on the patrol report in her hands as though it contained the secrets of the universe.
"I have been working." Her voice came out steadier than she expected. "The archives are extensive. There is much to do."
She could feel him watching her. The weight of his attention pressed against the back of her neck, her shoulders, the curve of her spine as she hunched over the reading table. She had a quill tucked behind her ear and ink stains on her dress and she had not bathed since yesterday morning and she was suddenly, viciously aware of every way she must appear to him: small, disheveled, ridiculous in her determination not to meet his eyes.
"Verity."
Verity looked up.
