She was... soft. The word surfaced before he could stop it, dragging others behind it like debris in a flood. Soft curves and rounded shoulders and hips that would fill his hands, if his hands were allowed to touch her.
She was also dying.
The cold had her. He could see it in the blue tinge of her lips, the way her shaking had started to slow. Hypothermia didn't kill you all at once. It crept in, convinced you to stop fighting, made the cold feel almost warm at the end.
Ralvar took a step forward.
Her eyes flew open.
For one crystalline moment, they simply stared at each other. The massive orc warrior looming in the darkness, blood still on his knuckles, tusks gleaming faintly in what little light filtered through the trees, and the human woman curled in a hole in the ground with nothing between them but three feet of air and a lifetime of stories about what he was.
She screamed.
The sound cut through the quiet forest like a blade, high and raw and full of the kind of terror that came from bone-deep belief. She scrambled backward, her spine hitting rock, nowhere to go, and her hands came up in front of her face as if that could stop him.
He'd heard humans scream before. Battle screams, death screams, the sounds men made when they knew they were goingto die. It had never bothered him. They were enemies. They came to his territory with swords and torches and the intent to kill, and if they died screaming, that was the consequence of their choices.
But this—
This was different.
She wasn't a soldier. She wasn't a raider. She was a woman in a torn dress with scratches on her arms and terror in her eyes, and she was looking at him like he was death itself come to collect her.
And she wasshaking. Not just from cold anymore, but from fear ofhim.
The urge that flooded through Ralvar was so strong it nearly drove him to his knees.
Protect.
Soothe.
Make her understand.
He forced himself to move slowly. He lowered himself to one knee, then the other, reducing his height by nearly half. His hands—the hands that had killed six raiders tonight, that had broken bones and torn through leather armor—he turned them palm-up. Empty. Offering.
"I will not harm you."
His voice came out rough, the product of hours without speech, of a throat that formed orcish consonants more easily than the softer sounds of the common tongue. He tried again.
"You are safe."
She didn't believe him. He could see it in every line of her body, in the way she pressed herself against the rock like she could phase through it if she pushed hard enough. Her breath came in sharp, panicked bursts. Her eyes—brown, he noticed, dark and wide—darted between his face and his hands and the darkness behind him, calculating escape routes that didn't exist.
"Please—" The word came out of her like a wound. "Please, I don't—I can't—"
She was crying. He hadn't noticed at first, the tears lost among rain and shadow, but now he could see them tracking down her cheeks. Could smell the salt of them underneath the fear.
Something ancient and terrible rose in Ralvar's chest.
Who did this?
The thought was savage. Possessive in a way that made no sense. He didn't know this woman, didn't know her name or her story or why she was freezing to death in his mountains. But logic didn't matter. He only knew what he saw: a female in distress.Histerritory.Histo protect.
"The cold is killing you." He kept his voice low and level. "If you stay here, you will die before morning. I can help you. I can take you somewhere warm."
"So you can—" She choked on the words. "So you can—" She couldn't finish. Couldn't say whatever horrors she'd been taught to imagine.
"I do not harm women." The words came out harder than he intended. "I do not harmanyonewho is not a threat to my people. You are not a threat. You are—"
