Claiming The Orc Prince (Ironpeak Orcs #7)

Chapter One

Harper

The Washington Post newsroom smelled like burnt coffee and quiet desperation, which Harper Stone had always thought was an appropriate combination for a profession that was slowly dying.

She sat at her desk in the far corner of the third floor—the corner they’d started calling Siberia after the latest round of layoffs emptied out the cubicles around her—and stared at the email that had just landed in her inbox.

Harper closed the email without responding and took a sip of coffee that had gone cold two hours ago.

Around her, the real journalists worked the real stories.

Terrence Boyd was on the phone with a congressional aide, voice low and urgent.

Delia Washington had three monitors open, cross-referencing campaign finance records.

Two desks away, the kid they’d hired straight from Northwestern, twenty-three years old and already on the national desk, was outlining something about infrastructure spending that would probably win him an award.

Harper was being sent to write about orcs. The anniversary of a treaty. A feel-good feature to fill column inches between ads for luxury watches and erectile dysfunction medication.

This is what you get, the voice in her head said. This is what happens when you trust the wrong source and your career eats a bullet.

Two years. Two years since the Vanguard Pharmaceuticals investigation, the one that should have been her Pulitzer, the one that proved a Fortune 500 company had been conducting unauthorized drug trials on supernatural beings.

Every word of that story had been true. She’d spent eight months building it, confirming every detail, triple-checking every source.

But one source, one, had been compromised.

An anonymous informant whose identity leaked when Vanguard’s legal team subpoenaed phone records.

The Post’s lawyers panicked. The retraction went out.

And Harper Stone, who had once been the youngest reporter on the investigative desk, found herself exiled to the supernatural beat, which her colleagues treated as one step above writing horoscopes.

The worst part wasn’t the demotion. The worst part was the silence.

Colleagues who had sought her opinion on sourcing strategies stopped coming to her desk.

Editors who had fast-tracked her pitches now took three days to respond.

She had become a liability, not because the story was wrong, but because the retraction had embarrassed the institution, and institutions punished their embarrassments.

Harper had spent the first year angry. The second year numb. Now she was something worse: resigned. She still came in early, stayed late, sourced meticulously, wrote clean copy. But the fire that had driven her since Columbia, the conviction that truth was worth any price, had banked to embers.

She opened her desk drawer and looked at the printout she kept there, the retraction notice, folded precisely in thirds. She didn’t keep it as punishment, exactly. More as a reminder. Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets. Every story has a price. Make sure you can pay it.

Her phone buzzed. Mom.

“Baby, your daddy and I were just talking about you.” Lorraine Stone’s voice was warm Georgia honey, the kind of accent that made everything sound like an invitation to Sunday dinner. “When are you coming home? Your cousin Keisha’s engagement party is next month and she specifically asked, ”

“I’m being sent to Washington state, Mama. For work.”

A pause. Harper could practically hear her mother recalibrating. “Washington state? Isn’t that where those... those big green people live?”

“Orcs, Mama. They’re called orcs.”

“I know what they’re called. I watched the same news you did. Your father nearly had a heart attack when those pictures came out twenty-five years ago.” A beat. “Is this a real assignment or one of those ones you pretend to be excited about?”

That was the thing about Lorraine Stone. She couldn’t program a DVR, but she could read her daughter like a headline.

“It’s a feature, Mama. Human interest.”

“Mm-hmm.” The sound conveyed a doctoral thesis on maternal doubt. “Well. Be careful. And call your father. He worries.”

After she hung up, Harper pulled up the research she’d been doing on her own time, not for the puff piece, but for the story underneath it. The one that had been nagging at her for months.

She’d been tracking anomalies. Subtle ones, the kind most people wouldn’t notice unless they were looking.

Unusual budget reallocations in the Department of the Interior.

Military movements in the Pacific Northwest that didn’t match any publicized training exercises.

A memo she’d obtained through a FOIA request that referenced treaty “renegotiation” in language that sounded less like diplomacy and more like a hostile takeover.

And then there was the congressional aide who’d reached out to her through an encrypted channel three weeks ago. No name, no face, just a message: If you want the real story about Ironpeak, go there. Look at the military positions. Follow the money.

Harper had spent two years being careful. Careful was safe. Careful kept your job. Careful meant never again feeling the cold dread of watching your editor’s face as he told you the story was being pulled.

But careful was also killing her. Slowly, the way a river dies when someone dams the headwaters, not all at once, but bit by bit until the current is just a memory.

She replied to Carruthers’s email: Accepted. Flying out Thursday.

Then she opened her real notebook, a physical one, Moleskine, unconnected to any network that could be subpoenaed, and wrote three words at the top of a fresh page:

What are they hiding?

* * *

The flight from D.C. to Seattle was five hours.

Harper spent the first two reading everything she could find about the Ironpeak Settlement, the third editing a draft of a piece on supernatural voter registration that would never win her anything, and the fourth staring out the window at a country that looked, from thirty thousand feet, like it had its act together.

She’d printed out Emma Davidson’s original photographs, the ones that had broken the story of orc existence twenty-five years ago.

They were famous now, exhibited in museums and reprinted in textbooks, but Harper had first encountered them at fourteen, at a school library in Atlanta, and they had changed the trajectory of her life.

Not because of the orcs, though they were remarkable, seven feet tall, green-skinned, tusked, built like the earth itself had decided to stand up and walk around.

It was the way Davidson had photographed them.

Without sensationalism. Without the othering gaze that most media applied to anything non-human.

She’d shot them the way you photograph someone you love: honestly, with all their rough edges and quiet beauty intact.

Harper had looked at those photographs and thought: That’s what journalism is supposed to be. Seeing people as they are, not as the world tells you they should be.

She traced the edge of one print, the orc chief, Drak, standing at the entrance to the settlement with his human mate beside him.

Emma Davidson, who’d gone to the mountains as a photographer and stayed as a wife.

Mother. Matriarch. The woman who’d changed the world with a camera and the courage to look.

In the airport bookshop, she’d bought a copy of Emma’s retrospective, the one published for the twentieth anniversary, and read it cover to cover during the layover.

The photographs were extraordinary. Not because of technical skill, though the skill was evident, but because of intimacy.

Emma Davidson had photographed the orcs the way you photographed family: with love, without sentimentality, and with the absolute refusal to look away from the hard parts.

Harper was about to meet their son.

Drake, son of Drak and Emma. Twenty-six years old.

Georgetown-educated. The diplomatic face of Ironpeak, frequently cited in media as the “bridge between worlds.” Every photograph Harper had seen showed the same thing: a polished, photogenic half-orc with his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s commanding height, always in a suit or ceremonial dress, always saying exactly the right thing.

Harper distrusted “always the right thing” on a molecular level. People who always said the right thing were usually hiding the wrong ones.

The pilot announced their descent into SeaTac. Harper folded the photographs, tucked them into her carry-on beside the Moleskine, and watched the Cascade Mountains rise through the window like teeth.

I’m coming for the truth, she thought. Whatever that turns out to be.