Chapter 10
The seventh bell found Verity standing outside Targesh's quarters, her less-rumpled traveling dress smoothed as flat as determined hands could manage, her report clutched against her chest like a shield.
The door was heavy oak, banded with iron. She raised her hand to knock, then lowered it. Raised it again. Stood there like an idiot with her fist hovering in the air, her pulse knocking against her collarbone so hard she could count it.
You agreed only to stop hiding. This is the opposite of hiding. This is walking directly into—
The door opened.
Targesh stood in the frame, and Verity's breath stopped mid-draw.
He had changed into a dark tunic that fit close across his shoulders, with leather bracers at his wrists.
His hair, usually loose, had been pulled back from his face, revealing the full architecture of his features: the heavy brow, the strong jaw, the tusks curving upward like ivory parentheses around whatever words he might speak.
He looked like exactly what he was. A warchief. A leader of warriors. A male in his prime, at the height of his power, and she was standing in his doorway clutching a sheaf of parchment like it might protect her from the weight of his attention.
His eyes traveled over her. She held still under it, her shoulders drawing back, her chin lifting—an instinct she hadn't planned.
He noted the dress, dark blue wool that actually fit her properly.
Noted the hair she had attempted to arrange.
Noted, probably, the thundering of her pulse and the flush prickling along her jaw.
"Come in," he said, and stepped aside.
His quarters were large. A main chamber with a hearth already lit, flames casting dancing shadows across stone walls. A table set with two places. A doorway leading to what she presumed was a sleeping chamber, firmly closed.
The space was spare but not austere. Furs on the floor. A weapons rack holding an axe that could have cleaved her in half. Shelves lined with—
Books.
Verity stopped, her attention caught. The shelves held perhaps two dozen volumes, their spines worn with use.
"You seem surprised," Targesh said from behind her.
"You have books."
"I can read."
"I didn't mean—" She turned, found him closer than she had expected, and lost her train of thought. "I only meant that I didn't know you were a collector."
"I am not." He moved past her toward the table. "I keep what I read. Some things are worth returning to."
He pulled out a chair and looked at her expectantly.
Verity sat. The chair was orc-sized, which meant her feet dangled slightly above the floor. Targesh took the seat across from her, and even seated, he loomed.
"Your report," he said.
Right. The report. The official reason she was here, in his private quarters, with dinner laid between them and the fire crackling and the closed door to his sleeping chamber lurking at the edge of her vision.
Verity set the parchment on the table and launched into her prepared summary.
She spoke of the archives. Of Varresh's system, its complexity and intelligence. Of the connections she had begun to map, the patterns emerging from apparent chaos. She described her methodology, her timeline, her preliminary conclusions about the scope and significance of the collection.
Targesh listened without interrupting. His eyes never left her face, but his expression remained neutral. A warchief receiving a report from a scholar under his authority. Nothing more.
When she finished, he nodded once.
"Your work is good," he said. "Thorough. You see things others would miss."
"Thank you."
"You may continue as you have been. Weekly reports, delivered in person."
"In person," she repeated. "Here?"
"Unless you object."
She should. Private dinners in a warchief's quarters were not appropriate venues for scholarly reports, regardless of what agreements had been struck.
"I don't object," she said instead.
He held her gaze for a moment longer than necessary. Then he reached for the covered dishes and began to serve.
The food was excellent. Roasted meat in a sauce she didn't recognize, root vegetables glazed with honey, bread still warm from the ovens. Kira's work, clearly, though the portions were more reasonable than the cook's usual campaign of aggressive nourishment.
They ate in silence at first. She lifted her cup too carefully. Tore the bread in pieces too small. Drew her knife across the plate and flinched at the scrape of metal on ceramic.
"I expect you have more questions," Targesh said eventually. "Ask them."
Verity set down her fork. "What did Durgan mean this morning? About—" She gestured vaguely at herself. "Abundance."
He cocked his head, his brow drawing together, the lines around his eyes deepening.
"Durgan sees as orcs see," he said carefully. "Your body is valued. Among my people."
"Valued how?"
"Softness is not weakness." He was watching her with an intensity that made her skin prickle. "A body like yours speaks of plenty. Of warmth. Of—" He stopped, and she saw his jaw tighten, a visible exercise of restraint. "You are considered beautiful. By our standards. Profoundly so."
She sat back, surprised.
No one had ever called her beautiful. Pretty, perhaps, in the way that plain girls were sometimes called pretty by relatives who felt obligated. Handsome, once, by a fellow scholar who had meant it as a compliment to her mind rather than her face. But beautiful—
"You seem unconvinced," Targesh said.
"I am—" Verity pressed her palms flat against her thighs. "In Valdara, I am not considered beautiful. I am considered... substantial. Which is not the same thing."
The fire crackled. Outside, the wind had risen, pressing against the shuttered windows with low moans. The fortress sounds seemed very far away.
"When Durgan spoke to you this morning," Targesh said, "I wanted to remove him from the hall."
Verity blinked. "Why?"
He held her gaze. "Because I have been thinking of your body since the moment you arrived." Simple. Flat. Absolute. "And I do not share."
Her mouth opened. Nothing came out. Her fingers curled against her thighs.
"Oh," she said.
Brilliant. Truly.
"I did not intend to say that tonight." He set his cup down carefully. "The report. The meal. I meant for this to be—"
"Professional?" she offered.
His jaw shifted. "Controlled."
He leaned forward, and the motion brought him close enough that she could see the individual scars mapping his face, the texture of his skin, the way firelight caught the curve of his tusks.
"I would like to touch you," he said.
Verity's breath caught. Her hands were still pressed flat against her thighs, anchoring her to the chair.
She nodded.
He reached across the table. His hand moved slowly, giving her time to flinch, to pull back, to remember that she was a Valdaran scholar and he was an orc warchief and this was madness.
She didn't move.
His palm settled against her cheek.
She had known, abstractly, that his hands were large, but knowing was different from feeling. His hand curved around the side of her face, fingers extending past her temple, thumb resting near the corner of her mouth. He could have cupped her entire skull in one palm.
He held still. Watching her. The rough texture of his skin caught against hers, calluses mapping years of warfare across her cheekbone.
Verity turned her head, just slightly, and pressed into his palm.
"Your skin." His voice had dropped to a rasp. "In the firelight. Do you know what you look like?"
"No," she whispered.
"Warm," he said. "Warm and gold and—" His thumb traced her lower lip, and her breath stuttered, her fingers tightening on the chair's edge. "I should stop."
"Yes," she agreed, though she made no move away.
"I am going to kiss you instead."
It was not a question. But he paused, his hand still cradling her face, his eyes searching hers for objection. For hesitation. For any sign that she wanted him to be the controlled, measured warchief he always had been.
She gave him none.
He rose from his chair and circled the table without releasing her face, his palm sliding from her cheek to the curve of her jaw, tilting her head back as he came to stand before her.
Verity looked up. The angle was absurd. She was seated in a chair built for someone twice her size, feet not quite touching the floor, and he was standing over her like a mountain.
His other hand found the arm of her chair. He leaned down.
The first brush of his mouth was careful. His lips were rougher than a human man's, the texture different, and his tusks pressed cool and smooth against the corners of her mouth.
A low, unguarded sound broke from the back of her throat.
He pulled back. "Verity."
"Again," she said.
He kissed her properly then.
His hand slid from her jaw to the back of her neck, fingers threading into her carefully arranged hair and destroying it utterly.
He pulled her up, and she went, rising from the chair to meet him, her hands finding his chest because she needed something solid to prove this was happening outside her own fevered imagination.
His tusks pressed against her cheeks as he deepened the kiss, and she should have found it strange—should have been cataloging the differences, the anthropological curiosities—but her mind had gone quiet for the first time in years.
There was only this. His mouth. His hands. The vibration under her palms, low and constant, rattling through her wrists.
He broke the kiss to breathe, his forehead pressed to hers. His breath came ragged. Hers was worse.
"If you stay," he said, "I will not stop at a kiss. Do you understand?"
She understood.
She understood that she wanted him. That her body, which she had spent years treating as merely a vehicle for her mind, was suddenly and insistently making demands.
She also understood that she was not ready. That the wanting was real but so was the fear.
"I need—" The word caught, split in half. "I need time."
He released her, stepping back, creating distance. His expression was carefully neutral again, but she could see the strain around his eyes and the grip of his hands at his sides.
Verity stood in the space he had made, her hair ruined, her lips swollen, her body humming with something she had no framework to process. The distance between them felt vast and insufficient at the same time.
"I should go," she said.
"Yes."
"Thank you," she said, "for dinner."
"Thank you for the report."
They stared at each other across the space between them. A warchief and a scholar, trading courtesies over the wreckage of a professional dinner.
Verity began to laugh.
She pressed her hand over her mouth, but it came through anyway—a sharp huff, then another, then her shoulders were shaking with it. Targesh watched her.
"I have amused you," he said.
"We're ridiculous." She wiped her eyes. "Standing here thanking each other for dinner and reports like—like—"
"Like two people who have not just—"
"Yes." She composed herself with effort. "Exactly like that."
He moved to the door, opening it for her. The corridor beyond was dim and quiet, the fortress settling into evening routines. Verity stepped past him, then stopped at the threshold. The flagstones pressed hard and uneven through her thin soles. She turned back.
"Next week," she said. "For the report."
"Next week."
She walked away before she could do something inadvisable, like reach for him again. Her footsteps echoed against the walls, too loud in the quiet corridor, announcing her retreat to every closed door she passed.
The route back to her chambers took her past the great hall.
Voices drifted through the open archway, orcs at their evening meal, the clatter of plates, someone's booming laugh.
She kept her head down and moved quickly, though no one seemed to notice the disheveled human scholar scurrying past with her hair falling from its pins.
Her door was a relief. She closed it behind her and leaned against the wood, pressing her spine flat to its solid surface.
The fire had burned low in her absence. The room was cold, the bed still neatly made, her notes still spread across the desk where she had left them. Everything exactly as it had been three hours ago. She was not.
Verity touched her mouth.
His taste lingered there. The pressure of his tusks against her cheeks had left no mark she could feel, but she pressed her fingers to the spots anyway, mapping the fading impression of smooth ivory on skin.
I have been thinking of your body since the moment you arrived.
She pushed off from the door and crossed to the washbasin. The water was tepid, but she splashed it on her face anyway, watching droplets run down her reflection in the small mirror above the stand.
Her hair was a disaster. Pins dangled uselessly from half-collapsed coils, and the careful arrangement she had spent twenty minutes constructing had become something that looked like she had been caught in a windstorm. Or caught against a warchief's chest with his fingers buried in her hair.
She pulled the remaining pins free and let her hair fall.
The woman in the mirror looked back at her. Round face. Soft jaw. The kind of features that faded into crowds, that slid past notice, that had never once stopped anyone in their tracks.
You are considered beautiful. By our standards. Profoundly so.
Verity turned away from the mirror.
She undressed, folding her blue wool dress over the chair, unlacing her stays with trembling fingers. Her nightgown was where she had left it, draped across the foot of the bed. She pulled it over her head and climbed beneath the furs.
The bed was cold. She curled onto her side, drawing her knees toward her chest, and stared at the dying embers of the fire.
She had kissed an orc.
No. She had kissed Targesh. She could still feel the span of his hand against her face, the rough drag of calluses on her cheekbone. That was not a category. That was a man.
Already her mind was circling, trying to reassemble its usual scaffolding, the analytical distance, the scholarly frame. The evening's events, considered in context, suggest a pattern of cross-cultural attraction consistent with—
She could still feel the vibration of his growl against her palms.
The scaffolding collapsed.
She thought of his books. The worn spines. I keep what I read. Some things are worth returning to.
The pillow had warmed beneath her cheek. Her breathing had slowed without her noticing, each exhale longer than the last, the room blurring at its edges.
Tomorrow there would be archives. Dust and parchment and the comfortable clarity of historical analysis. Tomorrow she would be a scholar again, methodical and precise, and this night would become simply another data point in her ongoing study of orc culture.
She did not believe it.