CHAPTER 62 Torj
CHAPTER 62
Torj
‘A bodyguard’s lapse in judgement, however fleeting, can be the catalyst for calamity’
– The Protector’s Manual: A Practical Guide for Safeguarding Nobility and Royalty
T HANKS TO W REN, Torj recovered far quicker than he had from any other wound. Her constant care meant he was back on his feet weeks earlier than he might have been otherwise, and back in the training ring much sooner as well. She watched him like a hawk, warning him not to push himself too hard too soon, and though he’d never admit it out loud, her concern for him touched him deeply.
‘Does your recovery mean you’ll be off on your secret Warsword excursions again before long?’ she asked casually one afternoon, flipping through an enormous tome.
‘Probably,’ Torj replied, suppressing a grimace. He’d barely thought of his secondary mission since his injury, but at its mention, he instantly dreaded having to make another report to Audra. He liked the idea of doing more field research even less.
‘Care to tell me where you’ve been going?’ Wren pressed, a single brow raised.
‘It would go against my orders,’ he said roughly.
He was no stranger to bending the rules when it suited him, but this? The truth would only hurt Wren. He knew she would blame herself for whatever fate awaited him, and he refused to subject her to such anguish, not after everything she had done for him.
She made a dissatisfied noise, turning back to her book. ‘I suppose things will go back to normal now the perpetrators of the royal attacks have been captured...’
‘So it seems,’ Torj allowed. ‘Security has certainly lessened.’
‘And what will you do after this bodyguard duty ends?’ Wren closed her book and turned to labour over her experiments, taking notes on shallow dishes of strange substances. Torj had been horrified to learn that she’d been using her own blood in her investigation into the unknown alchemy. But it explained the dots of crimson that often peppered her shirtsleeves at the crook of her elbow.
He cleared his throat. ‘I’m to be posted abroad.’
‘Oh.’ Wren didn’t look up from where she was using a dropper to add pale pink liquid to one of her samples. ‘How far abroad?’
‘Beyond the boundaries of where the Veil used to be,’ he replied, unable to stop himself from pacing across the room. ‘There are many places we haven’t yet explored. Places with different kinds of magic, different creatures...I’ve been wanting to go since—’
He cut himself off. Since before you sabotaged my chances by killing Edmund Riverton , was what he was going to say, but it somehow didn’t feel right now. The anger that had boiled so hotly in the wake of that event was gone. He did not resent being here, being her guard. In fact...he rather liked it.
‘Since?’ Wren prompted.
‘Since the war,’ he said instead.
She nodded to herself, still not meeting his gaze. ‘Then I’m happy for you. That you’ll get to go where you’ve always wanted. Another adventure to your name...’
What he wanted was to tell her that life had been full of adventure with her at his side, that he needed nothing more, wanted nothing more. But she wouldn’t look at him.
‘It’s the life of a Warsword,’ he told her.
Wren’s quill scratched against parchment as she scrawled something furiously across the page. ‘So it is.’
Torj returned to his usual duties of escorting Wren to her classes and assignments tasked by the masters. He knew she had given up a lot of time and opportunities to look after him in those first few weeks after his injury, and so he tried to help her in any way he could: bringing her food when she’d forgotten to stop for a break; leaving his restricted books open for her to read, knowing that she didn’t have clearance for the masters’ section of the archives. Sometimes he’d find her asleep at her workbench, and he’d carry her to bed and drape the blankets over her. In those quiet breaths of hers between waking and sleep, he’d allow himself a moment to drink her in, to imagine another life, where things might have been different between them.
He dreaded the missive from Audra telling him he was no longer needed as the poisoner’s guard, but it didn’t come. The post abroad he had wanted so badly now felt like an ambition belonging to someone else.
As the Gauntlet drew closer, and Wren’s efforts intensified, Torj found that the storm magic lingering inside him did the same. He felt her passion and her fury beneath his scars like it was a part of him, and there was no greater privilege than to watch her come into her own as she surpassed every expectation put upon her shoulders.
Something had shifted between bodyguard and ward – something minute to the outside eye, but undeniable to Torj himself. He’d never told anyone about his past before, not Wilder or Talemir, not Cal or Kipp. He had long since suspected that Farissa knew, as she’d known his grandmother years before, but he’d talked to no one about it. Until Wren. When she wasn’t scowling or sniping at his overprotective nature, she was easy to talk to. There was no judgement, no pressure, only a quiet thoughtfulness that made him want to talk to her, want to share things he’d buried deep down.
It was so much more than just words. Months had passed and he still thought daily about what she’d told Dessa on their run. That no man had brought her to orgasm. It was one of many things he wanted to share with her.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked from her workbench, having paused to survey him.
He was sitting on the edge of her bed, cleaning his weapons while she worked. His hands stilled over the runes on his hammer.
‘Nothing,’ he said, clearing his throat. ‘Why?’
Wren chewed her lower lip. ‘You had a look...’
‘Oh?’
Her hand drifted to her chest. ‘And I felt...something.’
‘Did you now, Embers?’ He let the teasing note linger and waited for her to object to the nickname.
She didn’t. Instead, she picked up a small blue vial and brought it to him. ‘Here.’
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s a cleaning aid,’ she told him. ‘I made it for you – for your war hammer.’ She knelt at his side, and all the thoughts emptied out of Torj’s head.
Wren was on her knees. He couldn’t count how many times he’d imagined her exactly like that.
Cursing himself and his filthy mind, he exhaled a tight breath and looked at her, trying not to stare at her pretty mouth and the dusting of freckles across her nose.
She uncorked the vial and took the rag he’d been using from his hand. Only decades of training enabled him to remain still, ignoring the jolt of electricity that passed between them as his fingers brushed hers.
Applying a generous amount of the concoction to the fabric, Wren swiped it across the weapon’s iron head, and he watched with fascination as the grime and dried blood fizzled away into nothing, leaving his war hammer looking freshly forged.
‘That’s incredible,’ he murmured, tracing the now clear runes with his thumb. ‘Thank you.’
Pink stained Wren’s cheeks. ‘It was nothing.’
‘No,’ he told her. ‘It wasn’t.’
‘We were asked to combine our knowledge of design and warfare. I thought something like this might be useful...’ She tossed the vial to him as she got to her feet, and he caught it between his fingers.
‘Well...Thank you for thinking of me,’ he said, finding his voice hoarse.
‘I do, you know,’ she ventured. ‘Think of you.’
Gods, his chest ached, and it took all his self-restraint not to go to her. ‘And I you.’
She nodded stiffly, and they both returned to their work.
Preparations for the Gauntlet were well underway, and every team was pushing themselves to breaking point. The tension in the air was palpable. As the days passed, Wren became more private about her work, and Torj knew she was keeping things from him. They still talked, but sometimes when he entered her rooms, he could smell the metallic tang of blood, could taste the lightning singeing the air. But there was no trace of either – just potions and her usual chaos.
When Wren was immersed in her studies and experiments, Torj continued his research on magical injuries, often from his place on the end of her bed. Royal Magic and Its Consequences . Accidental Curses and Life-Altering Events . The Thesaurus of Magical Connections .
Each was blander and more uninformative than the last. Whenever Wren asked what he was reading, he’d wave one of the bodyguard textbooks at her. He’d taken to fitting their dust jackets around his true reading material, hoping that the titles alone would be enough to lose her interest.
Sitting on Wren’s bed now, he tossed another book aside with a frustrated sigh and glanced up at the alchemist. Her hair was a mess, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and something purple stained her hands and was splattered across the front of her apron.
He traced the outline of his scars while he watched her. She was a vision, as always.
‘I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ he heard himself say, already regretting the words spilling from his traitorous mouth.
‘Ask me what?’ she said without turning around.
‘What you asked me weeks ago...Have you ever been in love?’
He saw her hands still over her crucible, but she still didn’t turn around. ‘I have known the deep, enduring love of friendship, of sisterhood...But no, I’ve never been in love.’
‘That makes two of us, then.’
‘I thought you had,’ she replied quietly. ‘You told me not since...’
What he’d been about to say was not since you . ‘You misunderstood,’ was all he told her now.
‘I see.’
He shifted uncomfortably. ‘So, no romantic interests for you, then?’
‘I’ve been with men, if that’s what you’re asking, Bear Slayer...But found them to be disappointing, shallow, and underwhelming at best. Thea thinks I became closed off after the war, but truthfully...it was happening long before then. She just wasn’t around as much to see it.’
‘And now?’ Torj ventured slowly.
To his surprise, Wren laughed, a beautiful, melodic sound that he’d sell his soul to be the source of.
‘Now there’s a certain bodyguard who has issues with boundaries,’ she said. ‘So it’s been harder to keep my walls up.’
A smile broke across his face at that, and Wren looked at him, smiling back.
‘For what it’s worth,’ he told her, ‘you deserve more. You deserve everything.’ He stopped himself before he said something he shouldn’t. Before he told her that if she was his, he’d never let her go.
He heard her sharp intake of breath, and her hands went to the ties of her apron. She undid the laces and lifted the fabric over her head, turning to him. ‘You truly believe that?’
He felt his throat bob as he swallowed the lump that had formed there. ‘You know I do.’
She stood in the centre of the room, her fingers still stained purple, a smudge of colour on her cheek as well. But there was nothing but thunder in her stare as she pinned him with it. ‘And yet you refuse to give me what I want.’
Slowly, Torj stood, heart hammering. ‘And what is it that you want, Embers?’
‘I want to know what it’s like,’ she murmured as he took a step towards her. ‘What it can be like...with someone like you.’
‘Wren...’ Her name shuddered out of him, a plea. ‘We can’t. I’m your bodyguard...’ The words caused him physical pain as he forced them out. All the while, his steps betrayed him, closing the gap between them.
‘Not here. Not inside these walls,’ she said. ‘Right now, it’s just you and me. Torj and Wren. I know what I want. And I think you want it too.’
There was no hiding the bulge in his leathers, the rise and fall of his chest, and deeper still, the torrent of blazing magic coursing down the bond between them.
‘What I want isn’t a factor,’ he ground out. His whole body was rigid with tension, with wavering restraint as he warred with himself, and Wren’s gaze tracked the bunching of his muscles.
He couldn’t breathe. Not with her so close, not with her scent wrapped around him like an intoxicating spell, not with the words she’d spoken swinging between them like a pendulum. He wanted to fall to his knees before her, to worship her.
‘Tell me you don’t want me, Bear Slayer,’ she said, taking another step towards him.
The rules, the barriers – none of them mattered. All that mattered was the piece of her that had already burrowed itself deep in his heart.
‘I’ll never tell you that,’ he murmured, before he lunged for her.