The band has started. A ten-piece ensemble with a standing bass, a full brass section, and a vocalist in a sequined gown who is singing something slow and rich and aching. The dance floor gleams. Empty, for now. Couples hover at its edges, drinks in hand, waiting for someone to go first.
My shoes click against the hardwood. Guests part. Not dramatically, not with fear, just the natural physics of a large object moving through a crowd. Bodies shift. Conversations pause mid-syllable. A waiter with a tray of champagne flutes performs an elegant sidestep without breaking stride.
Magnolia stands near the cake platform, mid-sentence with a cousin. Her back is to me.
The cousin's eyes go wide. Travel up. Keep traveling. The sentence dies on her lips.
Magnolia's brow furrows. She turns.
I'm already there.
I bow.
Deep. Formal. Right hand on me, left arm swept behind my back, chin dropping to sternum. A full Orcish court bow. The kind reserved for war chiefs and blood-bonded mates. The kind I learned from my mother before a raid took her when I was nine. The kind no mercenary wastes on a contract.
I hold it for three heartbeats.
Then I straighten. Extend my hand. Palm up. Scarred fingers open.
"Dance with me."
Not a question.
Her lips part. The green dress catches the chandelier light. Her brown eyes hold mine, and in them I see the fountain, the flour, the freezer, the burning kitchen, the battered van with no windshield, every stupid impossible thing that brought us to this exact square foot of polished dance floor.
She places her hand in mine.
I settle my left hand against the small of her back. My palm spans from hip to hip. She places her free hand on my forearm because my shoulder is simply too high to reach comfortably. Her fingers press into the scars through my rolled shirtsleeve.
The vocalist holds a note.
We move.
CHAPTER 15
MAGNOLIA
His hand covers the entire lower half of my back. Five fingers spread wide, each one a warm brand through the silk of my dress. The fabric is still damp from the fountain. His ruined tuxedo jacket hangs heavy on my shoulders, three sizes too large, the sleeves dangling past my fingertips. I smell smoke and buttercream and something underneath that is just him. Iron. Cedar. The faintest trace of griffin.
We turn.
The fairy lights blur. Hundreds of them, strung between the oak trees in long golden arcs, and beneath them a hundred upturned faces watching the enormous green monster waltz a five-foot-three baker across the floor like she weighs exactly nothing.
I weigh something. I weigh a lot of somethings. But his hand at my back lifts and guides with such precise, impossible gentleness that my feet barely register the hardwood. He leads with his whole body. Shoulders first, then hips, the movement rippling down through his frame the way water moves through a river. Controlled current. I just float in it.
"You're staring at my chest."
"Your chest is at my eye level. I have limited options."
A rumble. Low. The vibration travels through his ribcage directly into my palm where it presses flat against his sternum. His heartbeat thuds under my fingers. Slow. Steady. A drum keeping time with something older than the band.
We turn again. The hem of my green dress fans out. One of the cousins whispers something behind her champagne flute. My mother is on the dance floor with both hands wrapped around a gin and tonic, watching. Not scowling. Not smiling. Just watching with an expression I have never seen on her face before and cannot name.
"Your mother is tracking us."
"She tracks everything. Family trait."
"Tactical awareness. Respectable."
