"I don't know what I want," she said finally. Her voice was very small. "I've never—no one's ever asked me that before."
"Then I will keep asking," he said. "Until you know the answer."
She looked at him, searching his face for deception, for hidden motives, for any sign that this was a trap. He let her look. Let her see whatever she needed to see.
After a long moment, she nodded. It was a tiny movement, barely perceptible, but it felt like a victory.
"Okay," she whispered. "Okay."
She didn't tell him to come closer.
But she didn't tell him to move back, either.
Chapter 6
Dawn crept into the watchtower like a thief.
Delia watched the slow dissolution of darkness, the gray light seeping through the ruined walls and the open doorway, spreading across the stone floor toward the dying fire. She hadn't slept again after the nightmare. Couldn't. Not with his words echoing in her head, replaying themselves over and over until they'd worn smooth grooves in her thoughts.
Instinct tells me you matter.
She didn't know what to do with that. Didn't know how to fit it into the framework of her life, where she'd always been the afterthought. No one had ever said she mattered. And now this orc—this massive, terrifying creature from her childhood nightmares—had knelt in the mud and told her she mattered, and she didn't know how to make that real.
The light continued its advance.
And as it did, the shadows that had hidden Ralvar began to peel away.
She'd seen him in darkness and in firelight. Seen the shape of him, the silhouette, the gleam of tusks and the brightness of those strange amber eyes. But that wasn't the same asseeinghim—not really—and when the dawn finally reached him, Delia's breath caught in her throat.
He was sitting where he'd been all night, on the far side of the burned-down fire, his back against the watchtower wall. His weapons lay beside him—the blade she'd watched him clean for hours, a smaller knife, something that might have been a hand axe. His hands rested on his thighs, palms up, loose and open.
But that wasn't what stopped her breath.
It was thesizeof him.
The darkness had hidden something. Some trick of shadow had softened his edges, made him seem merely large instead ofmassive. But in the sunlight, there was no softening. His shoulders were impossibly broad, stretching the worn leather of his vest until she wondered why it didn't simply tear. His arms were thick as tree limbs, corded with muscle that moved beneath green skin like something alive and separate. His thighs, where his hands rested, were as wide as her waist.
He was built like a fortress. Like a wall. Like something meant to hold back armies.
And his face—
The war-marks she'd glimpsed last night were clearer now: dark lines that traced his cheekbones, his jaw, the column of his throat, disappearing beneath leather and emerging again on his arms. Some were geometric and precise; others curved like wavesor wind. Scars interrupted them in places—a pale slash across his shoulder, a ragged line on his forearm, a nick in the curve of one tusk.
The tusks themselves were larger than she'd realized. They rose from his lower jaw, curving upward past his lips, polished smooth and ivory-pale. Weapons born of his own body.
He should have been horrifying, every inch of him designed for violence, for war, for the brutal efficiency of a predator at the top of his chain. This was the monster from the stories. This was the orc that human mothers invoked to make children behave.
But his hands were still open.
And when he noticed her watching him, he didn't move. Didn't reach for his weapons. Didn't do anything except meet her gaze, steady and patient and somehow, impossibly,gentle.
"The rain stopped," he said.
"I noticed." She didn't know why she was speaking. Why the fear that should have choked her felt distant instead, manageable, like a storm that had moved to the horizon. "Does that mean they'll—the guards—"
"They'll search." He said it simply, factually, without any attempt to soften it. "The storm will have slowed them, though. Washed away the tracks."
Delia's stomach lurched. "How long?"
