I’ve never been this close to one.
His skin is deep green, almost black in the apartment’s shadows. Scars map across what I can see of his flesh—blade marks, claw marks, old wounds healed into ridges of raised tissue. His face is brutal geometry: heavy brow, prominent tusks (one chipped, the edge jagged), a jaw that could break stone.
Twin axes hang at his belt. Simple. Functional. The kind of weapons that have seen use, that have been maintained with professional precision, that aren’t for show.
He watches me with banked coals where other people have expressions. No anger. No hunger. No anything I can read or predict or use.
Just… assessment. Calculation. The way a predator looks at something it hasn’t decided to kill yet.
“You touched the contract.”
His voice is low gravel. The kind of sound that rumbles up from somewhere deep in his chest, inevitable and unhurried. He doesn’t raise it. Doesn’t need to. Every word carries.
“That makes this complicated.”
He steps farther into the room. The door swings shut behind him of its own accord—no hand touching it, no breeze to move it, just the casual flex of magic that permeates everything in this godforsaken city.
My heart slams against my ribs hard enough to bruise. My burned palm throbs in time with my pulse. Every instinct I have screams at me to run, hide, make myself small and invisible the way I’ve done since I was nine years old.
But beneath the fear—something else.
Rage.
Pure, burning,usefulrage.
Because this orc didn’t put my brother in debt. Didn’t forge the contract that destroyed him. Didn’t design the trap that swallowed him whole. But he’s here now, standing in Gror’s empty apartment, telling me things arecomplicatedwhile the walls still bleed ink and my brother is gods-know-where and my hand bears a brand I never agreed to carry.
He’s here. And that makes him a problem to be solved.
