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"Promise still stands," I say into her hair, when I can speak.

She lifts her head. Firelight in her lashes, a smear of soot on her cheek, more beautiful than any framed shot she's ever produced. "Which one?"

I trace the line of soot on her cheek with my thumb, gentle, a man handling something he intends to keep for the length of his life. Her heartbeat gallops against my palm, quick and small and mine.

"No hiding. Nothing hidden later. Nothing ever."

"Out loud," she whispers. She sets a kiss over my heart, right where I put her hand. "I promise. Storm's my witness."

Thunder answers, rolling long across the hollow, and I pull the edge of the coat over us both and hold her while the water runs into the buckets and the world stays, for one whole night, entirely and only ours.

CHAPTER 25

JILLY

Iwake up warm for the first time in months.

Real warm. Bone-warm. A furnace of an Orc curled around me on a hearthstone, his arm a heavy bar across my middle, his breath stirring my hair in slow tides. Gray dawn leaks through the bay window. The rain has stopped. Somewhere outside, birds argue about the flood.

I don't move for a long time. I just exist inside the quiet, cataloguing it. His warmth. The ash-and-cedar smell of him. The absence of a single notification.

He stirs. One eye cracks open, ancient and gold in the early light.

"Morning," I whisper.

His arm tightens. "Water's down."

"You can tell that lying here?"

"I can tell that from the birds." He hauls us both upright, coat and all, and the world outside the window confirms it. The driveway has drained to mud. My poor SUV sits crusted in silt, but standing. The road is a road again, scarred and littered with branches, but passable.

Reality creeps back in with the daylight. I brace for the old dread, the schedule, the panic. It doesn't come. Instead there's just him, hauling on his flannel, and me, wearing his coat and nothing else, and a house we saved with our bare hands.

"We did it." I laugh, giddy. "The floor. The buckets. We actually..."

My phone buzzes.

Then buzzes again. And again. And then it doesn't stop, a machine-gun stutter against the bucket lid where I left it face-down twelve hours ago, signal roaring back to life all at once.

The old flinch grabs me first. I lunge for it out of pure muscle memory.

Four hundred and six notifications. Then five hundred. The number climbs while I stare, faster than I can read.

"Leave it," Oggan says quietly.

"I will. In a second." My thumb is already moving. Habit. Poison. I open the top one, and my stomach drops straight through the subfloor we spent the night saving.

It's a link. A TMZ link. The headline hits me low and hard.

VIRAL ORC HANDYMAN CAUGHT IN STEAMY CLINCH WITH INFLUENCER BOSS.

Below it, a thumbnail. Grainy, greenish, shot from a high corner. Two figures in a firelit room. Him lifting me. My arms around his neck. The angle is wrong, the light is bad, but there's no mistaking what it is or where it was taken.

The barndominium. Last night. Our night. The one with no cameras.

Except there was a camera.

The floor of my stomach keeps falling. I scroll with numb fingers, and the source line loads, and it names a "candid content partnership" and a "hidden trail-cam installation approved by management for authentic behind-the-scenes engagement."