Page 76 of Protective Pucking Orc

“Don’t talk about my Mate and daughter like that.”

The growl from my lips was full of threat, and for half a heartbeat, something ancient and animalistic in Anthony’s hindbrain heard it and went pale. Then his madness swallowed the warning whole, and he laughed again, and kept coming.

“Yours.” He slid forward, gaining confidence with each step, out past the ring of gold light, out toward the dark heart of the pond. “She’s not yours, beast. Nothing here is yours. Oh, I saw the game—I saw how your kind delights in violence, smashing each other into walls while the crowd howls. Is that the plan?” He spread his arms, gun and all, presenting himself. “You’re going to use your violence on me? In front of her? Go ahead. Show my daughter what you are.”

I kept skating backward. Slow. Steady. Fifteen feet between us now, and beneath his next step, the ice sounded a note only I could hear—a soft, glassy tick, like a claw tapping on a window.

Come on, I thought at him, cold as the water under us. Keep coming, you rotted thing. Come to me.

“You know what else I saw on that broadcast?” His voice went sing-song, tender, and it was the worst sound I’d heard in two worlds. “My precious little girl. Up on the big screen. Cheering.” He tilted his head to try to peer at Rosa, and he smiled at her. “I’m here to take her home.”

Rosa shuddered against my neck. Not a word. My brave, chattering kitling, silent as snow, and for that alone I could have crossed the ice and ended him with my hands.

I didn’t. I retreated one more stride and let my voice carry flat across the pond. “She’s not going anywhere with you.”

“She’s not yours, you animal!” The mask tore. His face twisted, and there it was, the thing under the cologne and the coat—the rot, the debt, the cruelty that had chased my family across half a country. “She’s mine. My blood! My property, signed and promised, and I am going to make use of her⁠—”

“I know exactly what you have planned for her, bastard.” I let the growl loose now, let it roll off the mountains, let it pull him. “You’ll never take her. You’ll never touch her. You will die never having touched her.”

It worked. Gods forgive me, it worked—his face went red with rage, and he came at me, fast, sliding steps eating the distance, straight across the dark middle of my pond, and beneath his shoes the ice ticked and ticked and⁠—

Two things happened at once.

Rosa—my sweet, fearless, helpful girl—pushed back from my shoulder, twisted in my arms, and called out across the ice in her clear little bell of a voice:

“You gotta be careful, mister! The ice is thin there!”

And light spilled gold across the snow as the porch door banged open.

“Anthony!”

Sofia. On the porch in her socks, tea abandoned, book abandoned, her breath ragged white clouds, her fear hitting me across sixty feet like a fist through our bond. “Leave them alone! I’m the one you want—take me, I’m the one you want!”

“Wrong!” Anthony twisted toward her voice, and the gun swung with him, away from me, toward the porch, toward my Mate, and my heart stuttered—seized in my chest like a bad engine. “I need my daughter, bitch. You I just want dead⁠—”

He planted his back foot to steady his aim.

The ice quit.

There was no crack of warning, no slow groan. The whole dark plate of it simply hinged beneath him with a sound like a snapped bone, and Anthony’s arms flew skyward, and the gun went off—crack crack crack, three shots straight up into the falling snow—and then the black water took him.

The splash was enormous. Rosa screamed. I clamped her face against my shoulder, turned her from it, and skated—hard driving strides for the porch, for the light, for Sofia already stumbling down the steps in her socks with her arms out.

“I have her—she’s safe—” I put Rosa into her mother’s arms and spun, planting myself between my family and the pond, chest heaving, every sense flung wide.

Behind me: sobbing, both of them, Sofia’s “hijita, I’ve got you” muffled against a small teal helmet.

Out on the pond: thrashing. Splashing. Curses in two languages, the wet slap of hands scrabbling at ice that broke away in plates at every grab. Three more shots split the night—wild, blind, skyward—and my ears tracked each round harmlessly into the high trees across the yard.

Then, quieter thrashing.

I stood on the snow-dusted grass at the edge of my property with my family at my back, and I watched the black hole in the middle of my pond, and I did not move.

Understand this: I could have tried.

Some corner of my mind laid it out with terrible clarity—a ladder from the garage, a rope, a blanket thrown flat across the ice. And the same cold corner answered: the ice would not hold a quarter of my weight. It hadn’t held his. Anyone who went out there would join him. And the only souls on this mountain lightweight enough to try were the two pressed shaking against my back, and he had come here, to my home, in the dark, with a gun, to kill one of them and steal the other.

No.