Chapter 12
Knox
The collar sits wrong against my throat. Too stiff. Too formal. Twenty years of leather and road dust, and my body has forgotten how orc silk feels against my skin.
Sarah reaches up and adjusts the fold, her small fingers smoothing the dark fabric until it lies flat. She's wearing a deep green dress that bares the claiming bite at the curve of her shoulder—silver-white against her skin, healed into a scar. She chose the dress on purpose. I know this because the bond hums with quiet defiance, a frequency I've come to recognize as my mate preparing for war.
"Stop fidgeting." She straightens the collar one final time and steps back to assess her work. "You look..."
"Ridiculous."
"Regal." Her mouth curves. "Like a biker who's now playing dress-up as a king again."
A low rumble builds in my chest—half laugh, half growl. The formal tunic arrived with the first letter months ago—packed alongside demands I burned without reading. My father's.Bloodstone silk, stitched with the clan sigil at the collar. I kept it for reasons I still can't explain. Sarah helped me air it out, mend the seam along one shoulder where moths had eaten through the thread. She didn't ask questions. Just handed me a needle and sat beside me while I stitched.
My queen. My mate. My everything.
"Ready?" she asks.
"No."
She takes my hand. "Good. Let's go."
The Cove Hotel sits on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, its dining room empty at my request. Neutral ground. Garrett and Finn wait outside, visible through the windows. The way brothers should be when their president walks into uncertain territory.
I smell him before I see him.
Cedar smoke and iron ore. The musk of high-altitude orc—thin air, cold stone, centuries of mountain living baked into blood and bone. The scent reaches across the empty dining room and drags me backward through two decades, landing me in my father's war tent with bruises on my arms and the taste of blood on my tongue.
Gar'than steps through the hotel's side entrance and the years collapse between us. He's older. The gray that touched his temples when I left now consumes his entire mane, braided in the formal style of clan elders, weighted with iron beads that click against each other when he moves. His tusks bear the ceremonial caps of a diplomatic envoy—polished bronze, etched with the Bloodstone sigil.
But his eyes haven't changed. Dark and steady. The same eyes that watched me train with a war axe at twelve, that trackedmy progress across battlefields, that stood witness in my father's war tent the night I refused to marry Korrath's daughter.
He stops ten feet from our table. His gaze moves from me to Sarah to the bite mark on her shoulder.
The silence stretches long enough to hear waves breaking against the bluff below.
"You claimed a human."
An accusation wrapped in disbelief, delivered in the old tongue—harsh consonants, guttural vowels, a language built for commands and curses.
I answer in English.
"I claimed my mate."
Gar'than's nostrils flare. His eyes cut to Sarah—her size, her species, the way she sits with her spine straight and her chin lifted. Measuring her the way orcs measure everything: by what she can endure.
Sarah holds his stare.
The rigid disapproval in his expression loosens by a fraction. But he lowers himself into the chair across from us with the grace of a man whose joints protest the movement but whose pride forbids acknowledging it.
"You wear your father's tunic to refuse his dying wish." He shakes his head. "Your mother would have laughed at that. She always did enjoy watching him lose."
My hand tightens on the edge of the table.
"Tell me why you're here, Gar'than."
"Your father is dying."
