Chapter Two
Drake
The journalist was going to be a problem.
Drake knew this the way he knew most things—through careful analysis, strategic reasoning, and the nagging intuition he’d inherited from his mother that told him when something was about to go sideways.
He stood in the council chamber, studying the briefing Fenris had compiled, and felt the familiar weight of being the person who had to think three moves ahead.
Harper Stone. Twenty-nine. Washington Post, supernatural affairs beat.
Columbia Journalism School, Spelman undergrad.
Previously on the investigative desk until a retraction two years ago knocked her into less prestigious territory.
Smart, relentless, and—according to Fenris’s sources, currently tracking military movements near Ironpeak on her own time.
That last detail was the one that made Drake’s jaw tighten.
“She’s not coming for a puff piece,” Fenris said from the doorway.
His cousin leaned against the frame with the casual ease of someone who could disappear into shadows between one breath and the next.
At twenty-three, Fenris had already built an intelligence network that would make most government agencies jealous, though he’d deny it with a joke and a grin if you asked.
“She’s been filing FOIA requests about Interior Department budget allocations.
She obtained a partial copy of the leaked memo about treaty renegotiation. ”
“How partial?”
“Enough to make her curious. Not enough to make her dangerous.” Fenris tilted his head. “Yet.”
Drake set down the briefing and walked to the window.
The settlement spread out below him, home, in all its complicated glory.
Twenty-five years ago, this had been a hidden refuge.
Now it was a sovereign nation in miniature: solar panels glinting on rooftops, the medical clinic Aunt Zoe had built into something the regional hospital envied, the forge still sending up smoke as Uncle Brek’s apprentices hammered away at commissions that sold for thousands online.
Children played in the square. Orc children, human children, half-orc children like him. They didn’t sort themselves by species. They sorted themselves the way all kids did, by who was fastest, who had the best snacks, who knew the best hiding spots. Drake envied their simplicity sometimes.
“What’s our play?” Fenris asked.
“Standard media protocol. Guided tour, approved interviews, controlled narrative.” Drake heard the words come out of his mouth and hated how practiced they sounded. “We show her the anniversary preparations, the cultural programs, the school. The story of peaceful coexistence.”
“And when she starts asking about the military exercises on our border?”
“We redirect.”
Fenris made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “You’ve read her work. This woman doesn’t redirect.”
Drake had read her work. All of it. The Vanguard Pharmaceuticals investigation, the retracted one, had been brilliant.
Meticulously sourced, compellingly written, damning in its conclusions.
The retraction hadn’t been about accuracy; it had been about legal technicality.
Drake recognized the playbook because he’d seen the government use the same one against his people: you can’t disprove the truth, so you discredit the truth-teller.
He respected her for the work. He feared her for the same reason.
“Keep your people close to her,” he told Fenris. “I want to know what she’s doing, who she’s talking to, what she’s looking at.”
“Surveillance.” Fenris said it flatly.
“Protection. For the clan.”
“For the clan.” Fenris repeated it in the tone he used when he thought Drake was lying to himself. Then he melted off the doorframe and was gone, silent as smoke.
* * *
Drake found his parents in the dwelling that had been their home for nearly thirty years.
The space had evolved over the decades, the way their marriage had, rough-hewn orc architecture softened by Emma’s touch.
Her photographs covered every wall: portraits of the clan, landscapes of the Cascades in every season, candid shots of children and elders and the thousand small moments that made up a life.
Drake’s entire childhood was archived on these walls, from his first steps (documented by his mother from three angles) to his Georgetown graduation (his father’s proud, bewildered expression immortalized in black and white).
Drak sat in his carved chair by the fire, the cane he’d started using last year propped against the armrest. He was sixty-three in human years, and the years showed in ways that made Drake’s chest ache if he looked too closely.
His father’s shoulders, once massive enough to block a doorway, had a slight forward curve now.
His movements, still powerful, had lost their quickness.
But his eyes, his eyes were the same. Sharp.
Assessing. The eyes of a chief who had seen every kind of danger and survived them all.
Emma sat beside him, editing photographs on a tablet with the same focused intensity she’d brought to everything since the day she stumbled into the settlement and accidentally changed history. At fifty-three, she was silver-haired and slight, and she could still command a room by walking into it.
“The journalist arrives tomorrow,” Drake said, settling into the chair across from them.
Drak grunted. It was a sound that could mean anything from “I heard you” to “I disapprove of the entire concept of journalism.” After three decades with a photographer wife, it usually meant the former.
“What do we know about her?” Emma asked without looking up from her tablet.
“She’s good. Smart. Burned by a retraction two years ago and assigned to the supernatural beat as punishment. She’s coming for the anniversary feature, but Fenris thinks she’s working a bigger story on her own.”
Emma’s fingers stilled on the screen. She looked up, and Drake saw something in his mother’s expression he couldn’t quite name. Recognition, maybe. Or memory.
“A journalist following her instincts into dangerous territory despite professional consequences,” Emma said slowly. “That sounds familiar.”
Drak’s grunt this time definitely meant disapproval. “You were different.”
“Was I?” Emma’s smile held decades of shared history. “I was a photographer who stumbled into something she wasn’t supposed to see and decided the truth mattered more than her safety. Sounds exactly the same to me.”
“You stayed,” Drak said, as if that explained everything. For him, it probably did. His father had always been a man of few words, each one carrying the weight of ten. “This journalist. She will come, she will look, she will leave. They always do.”
“Maybe.” Emma set down her tablet and gave Drake the look that meant she was seeing more than he was showing.
His mother had always been able to read him like a contact sheet, scanning for the frame that told the real story beneath the posed one.
“Or maybe she’ll surprise you. You look tired, baby. Not body-tired. Soul-tired.”
Drake deflected with the smile that worked on senators and television hosts. “I’m fine, Mom. Just a lot going on.”
“Mm-hmm.” The sound was identical to the one Harper’s mother had made, an ocean away, though neither woman would ever know it. Mothers, regardless of species, shared a universal frequency of disbelief.
* * *
He visited Koroth and Carmen next.
His cousin’s dwelling was easy to find. You followed the sound of Carmen’s laughter, bright and warm and completely at odds with the six-foot-five wall of green-gray muscle who trailed her like a shadow with opinions.
Koroth sat on the porch, sharpening a blade that didn’t need sharpening, watching Carmen organize medical supplies for the clinic.
Six months of mating had softened precisely nothing about Koroth’s exterior.
He was still massive, scarred, and possessed of a resting expression that could curdle milk.
But the way he looked at Carmen, that was new.
That was a man who’d been drowning his whole life and finally found the surface.
“Reporter comes tomorrow,” Koroth said without looking up from his blade.
“Journalist,” Drake corrected.
“Same thing.”
“It’s really not.”
Carmen appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on a towel.
Six months into her new life at Ironpeak and she’d already established a counseling practice, trained three orc healers in trauma response, and organized a cultural exchange program with the nearest human town.
She was, in Drake’s opinion, the most terrifyingly competent person he’d ever met.
“Harper Stone,” Carmen said. “We exchanged emails before, when I was trying to find media contacts. She’s the real thing, Drake. Smart, principled, and she doesn’t take no for an answer.”
“That’s what worries me.”
Carmen leaned against the doorframe, studying him with the assessing calm of a woman who read people for a living. “What worries you specifically? That she’ll find something you don’t want found? Or that she’ll see something you don’t want seen?”
The question landed closer to home than Drake liked. He ignored it. “I can handle one journalist.”
Koroth’s blade paused mid-stroke. He and Carmen exchanged a look, the wordless shorthand of mates who’d forged their bond in fire.
Then Koroth went back to sharpening. Carmen went back to organizing.
And Drake felt the distinct impression that he’d just been assessed by two people who knew exactly how this was going to go.
“Watch yourself,” Koroth said to his blade. “Reporters are trouble.”
“Journalists,” Drake said again.
“Trouble,” Koroth repeated, and the ghost of a smile crossed his scarred face.
* * *
The council meeting went exactly as badly as Drake had expected.
The council chamber had been rebuilt twice in twenty-five years, once after a fire, once after the treaty expansion required a larger space.
It sat at the center of the settlement, a circular room with high ceilings and walls carved with the history of the clan.
Every chief, every battle, every mate bond, all of it etched into stone by Brek’s hands and, later, by his apprentices.
Twelve seats ringed the center. Drak’s carved throne was the largest, though he leaned on his cane more often than he sat these days.
Koroth stood behind Maya’s chair, his mother’s seat on the council.
Fenris lurked near the entrance. And Varek, Captain of the Guard, occupied his seat with the rigid posture of a man who considered slouching a character flaw.
Varek was pure orc. Full-blooded, dark green, built like a fortress.
He’d been born after the great hiding, raised by the clan after his parents died in the old wars.
Everything about him, his ritual scarification, his traditional speech patterns, his refusal to adopt human customs, was a deliberate statement about what he believed it meant to be orc.
Drake respected him. Drake also knew that Varek considered Drake’s Georgetown education a betrayal of orc values dressed up as progress.
“The journalist arrives tomorrow,” Drake reported to the council. “I’ll serve as her primary liaison. We’ll follow standard media protocols, ”
“Standard media protocols.” Varek’s voice was deep, measured, the kind of voice that didn’t need volume to command attention. “The prince means to fight our enemies with words. With a human journalist. With, ” he glanced at his notes, “controlled narrative and approved interviews.”
A ripple of reaction moved through the chamber. Not quite agreement, not quite dissent. Something in between.
“Words are weapons, Varek,” Drake said evenly. “My mother’s photographs did more for this clan than any single battle.”
“Your mother earned the right to tell our story by living among us. By bearing the chief’s son.
By choosing us.” Varek turned his gaze on Drake, and there was no malice in it, that was the worst part.
It would be easier if Varek were cruel. He was something more dangerous: sincere.
“This journalist has chosen nothing. She is here for her career, not for our people. And the prince trusts her because trusting humans is what he was trained to do.”
The silence that followed was the kind that has edges.
Drake felt the old familiar ache, the one that lived in the space between his orc blood and his human education, the crack in his foundation that Varek could always find.
He kept his face neutral. He’d learned that at Georgetown, where being the only orc in every room meant your composure was the first thing people tested and the last thing you could afford to lose.
“I was trained,” Drake said, “to protect this clan with every tool available. Strength is a tool. So is strategy. So is media. I intend to use them all.”
Drak spoke from his chair, and the room went still. “My son speaks for me in this matter. The journalist will be welcomed and watched. Both.” He looked at Drake, then at Varek. “We are strongest when we use every weapon we have. Not just the ones that draw blood.”
The meeting adjourned. Varek left without another word, his warriors falling into step behind him. Fenris caught Drake’s eye and raised an eyebrow that said everything his mouth didn’t.
Drake walked out into the evening air and stood at the ridge overlooking the valley. Below him, the settlement glowed with evening fires and solar-powered lights, a civilization built from nothing by people who’d been told they were nothing. His home. His burden. His heart.
Tomorrow, a journalist would arrive. She would look at everything Drake had spent his life protecting and she would ask questions he wasn’t sure he could answer. And somewhere in the government, people were making plans to take all of this away.
He stood there until the stars came out, and he didn’t feel the cold.