"I'm getting comfortable."
"You're testing my patience." His arm tightened, pinning her in place. "And my patience is not infinite."
Mab smiled into the darkness. There was something heady about this, about knowing she could affect him. That her body, the body she'd spent a lifetime trying to make smaller and quieter and less, could make a seven-foot orc warrior grit his teeth and struggle for control.
His breath was warm against the back of her neck. His hand spread across her belly, palm flat, fingers curved around the soft curve of her side. His nose pressed behind her ear.
"You smell like oranges," he rumbled.
"Annie brought one." Mab's thumb traced the ridge of his knuckle where his hand rested on her belly. "She got it from Drogga. We had never had an orange before."
"Never?" Varek asked drowsily.
"Never. My whole life in a kitchen, and I never tasted an orange."
"I will make sure you always have oranges in Northwatch."
His breathing was slowing behind her, the massive chest at her back expanding in longer, deeper intervals. His arm grew heavier across her waist. His hand, still spread across her belly, stopped moving.
She lay awake.
The fire crackled. Somewhere beyond the window, an owl called and was not answered. Varek's heartbeat thudded against her spine. Outside, the holding was settling into its occupiedquiet. Footsteps on stone. A voice giving orders in orcish, too distant to parse. The creak of the gate being drawn shut for the night.
Two days. In two days she would leave this place.
She thought about what Annie had said.I think I'm still scared. But I'm also excited.
The girl was braver than Mab. Annie had named both things at once and let them live in the same sentence. Mab had spent her whole life separating her feelings into categories.This is fear, so push it down. This is hunger, so ignore it. This is grief, so save it for the dark.
This is wanting, so close the door.
She had opened the door. She had opened it in the kitchen garden with rosemary under her fingers and then again in this room with her mouth on his skin. She had opened it and what was on the other side was not a single thing but a landscape, wide and unmapped and real, and she was standing at its edge with bare feet and no shoes.
Varek's arm was heavy. His heat was enormous. She could feel where the bruises on her hips pressed against the mattress, two thumbprints of ache that belonged to him, that she had pressed in the mirror and felt something sweet instead of something wrong.
She pressed her back into his chest. Felt his arms draw her closer in his sleep. Felt the heat of him wrap around her like a second skin.
She closed her eyes.
Chapter 13
The kitchen was cold.
Mab could not remember a time in her life when the kitchen had been cold.
But now the hearths were dark, swept clean of ash but holding none of the warmth that had filled this room every day of her life. The prep tables had been cleared, scrubbed down to bare wood. The iron smell of old blood still lingered near the cold hearth, faint but present, and she did not let herself look at the floor there.
Tibbs was already inside, crouched by the spice shelf. He had a small sack in his hands and was methodically checking each jar and pot, setting aside the ones worth keeping.
"Salt's still here," he said without looking up. "And the dried rosemary. They took the pepper."
"Pepper's worth more than salt by weight." Mab crossed to the scullery. "Easier to carry, too."
The trough was exactly as she'd left it. Gray film of sand and grease coating the basin, water long since drained. The rack beside it held the pewter chargers, and she touched the edge of the nearest one before moving past.
Her spare dress was where she'd left it, folded on the shelf above the washing supplies. Gray roughspun, patched at the elbows, the hem let down twice as she'd grown and never properly finished. Beside it, her apron. Her wool stockings, the ones Hester had mended three times because Mab kept wearing through the heels.
She gathered them into her arms. The fabric smelled like lye soap and woodsmoke and something underneath that was just her, the scent of years pressed into thread.
