Chapter Four
Drake
Sleep didn’t come.
Drake lay in his dwelling, staring at the ceiling, replaying two sentences on a loop like a song he couldn’t get out of his head.
That version of you. The one up there looking at the stars. That’s the real Drake.
This one? The charming prince? That’s the performance.
Three hours. She’d known him for three hours.
Senators who’d worked with him for years hadn’t cracked his surface.
Congressional aides who’d spent entire diplomatic sessions trying to get beneath his composure had walked away charmed and empty-handed.
His own family—with the exception of his mother, who saw through everyone because she’d spent half her life photographing souls—accepted the version of Drake he presented because it was useful, and useful was what the clan needed.
Harper Stone had looked at him in the moonlight and called it a performance. And the worst part, the absolutely unacceptable part, was that she’d been right.
He got up at dawn, gave up on sleep, and went to the training ground.
Physical exertion usually quieted his mind, the orc solution to every problem, which he’d always found both effective and slightly embarrassing.
He ran the perimeter trail, a six-mile loop through forest and ridge that Koroth used for conditioning, and pushed himself until his lungs burned and his thoughts narrowed to the simple, animal rhythm of muscle and breath.
It didn’t work. Halfway through the fourth mile, his brain helpfully supplied the image of Harper’s face in the starlight, the intelligence in her eyes, the challenge in her voice, the way she hadn’t backed down when he’d loomed over her at full height in the dark.
Most humans flinched. Not all of them, not anymore, twenty-five years of coexistence had dulled the instinctive fear response, but enough that Drake noticed when someone didn’t.
Harper hadn’t flinched. She’d looked at him the way she probably looked at a classified document: with focused intensity, searching for the information underneath the surface.
He ran faster. It still didn’t work.
* * *
He found Fenris in the intelligence room, a reinforced building near the council chamber that appeared, to casual observation, to be a records archive.
It was, technically. It just also happened to contain communications equipment, surveillance feeds, and Fenris’s elaborate network of human and orc contacts.
“Tell me about Harper Stone,” Drake said, still breathing hard from his run.
Fenris looked up from three screens running simultaneously.
For a man who traded in secrets, his expression was remarkably open.
“She’s exactly what her file says. Talented, driven, still carrying the retraction like a wound that hasn’t healed.
No political connections, no intelligence ties, no hidden agenda beyond the obvious. ”
“Which is?”
“She wants the story. Same way you want to protect the clan, it’s not a job for her, it’s a calling.” Fenris tilted his chair back. “She reminds me of Aunt Emma, actually. Same fire. Same stubborn belief that truth matters more than safety.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.” Fenris studied him with the quiet attentiveness that made him so effective at intelligence work.
People mistook Fenris’s humor for carelessness, which was exactly how he wanted it.
Behind the jokes, he saw everything. “You want to know something specific, cousin, or are you just here because she got under your skin?”
“She didn’t get under my skin.”
“You ran the perimeter trail. Four times. At dawn. After a night of what I’m guessing was zero sleep.” Fenris’s grin was insufferable. “She got under your skin.”
Drake leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms, aware that the posture was defensive and unable to care. “She said she could tell the difference between a tour and a performance. She looked at me and saw right through the, ” He stopped.
“The mask?” Fenris offered.
“I don’t have a mask.”
Fenris laughed. Actually laughed, full-throated, in a way he rarely did.
“Drake. Cousin. You have more masks than a theater troupe. You have the Georgetown Mask for humans, the Warrior Prince Mask for the traditionalists, the Dutiful Son Mask for Uncle Drak, and the Charming Diplomat Mask for everyone else. I’ve been watching you swap between them since we were kids.
” He paused, serious now. “The fact that this woman saw through them in three hours means she’s either dangerous or exactly what you need. Possibly both.”
Drake pushed off the doorframe. “Just keep monitoring her activities. I want to know what she’s looking at.”
“Already done. She spent twenty minutes at the settlement archive this morning before you were awake. She’s thorough.”
“The archive?” Drake’s stomach dropped. The archive held council meeting minutes, budget documents, things that told a story about Ironpeak’s defensive preparations that they very much did not want in print.
“Relax. She looked at publicly available materials. Cultural histories, census records, old photographs. Nothing classified.” Fenris paused. “Yet.”
That “yet” followed Drake all the way to the council chamber, where his day of official duties waited with the patience of a predator.
* * *
He spent the morning in meetings. Trade negotiations with a human cooperative in Portland.
A dispute between the forge apprentices about commission splits.
An update from Theron on medical supply shortages caused by the latest round of federal budget cuts that, coincidentally, targeted programs serving supernatural communities.
Through all of it, Drake was aware of Harper moving through the settlement like a current in still water.
Fenris’s people tracked her discreetly. She interviewed elder Shala for two hours, asked questions about orc courtship rituals that made the old woman laugh, and left with a recording and what Fenris’s scout described as “a look of someone who got something good.”
She talked to the school’s teachers, the forge apprentices, several younger orcs who’d never known the old days of hiding. She ate lunch in the communal hall and engaged four different people in conversation, including, this was the part that made Drake’s jaw tighten, Varek.
Fenris reported the conversation verbatim.
Harper had asked Varek about his philosophy of orc leadership.
Varek, to his credit, had given an honest and articulate answer about the importance of preserving orc traditions while acknowledging the necessity of adaptation.
He’d been charming. Harper had been charmed.
Drake was not jealous. That would be irrational and inappropriate and beneath him. He was concerned. Varek’s philosophy, in print, could be framed in ways that made the clan look divided, which would be ammunition for their enemies in the administration.
That was the reason for the acid burning in his chest. Definitely.
The day’s final meeting was with Drak, private. Father and son, chief and heir, in the quiet of the council chamber as the sun went down.
“The journalist is not what I expected,” Drake admitted.
Drak regarded him from his chair. Even seated, even aging, his father radiated a gravity that had nothing to do with size and everything to do with forty years of leadership. “What did you expect?”
“Someone I could manage.”
A sound that might have been a laugh. “Your mother was also not what I expected. I expected a frightened human woman. I got, ” He gestured at the walls of photographs. “Everything.”
“This is different.”
“Is it?” Drak leaned forward, his eyes sharp. “A human woman comes to our settlement. She sees more than she should. She asks questions that make you uncomfortable. She does not frighten easily.” He paused. “Sounds familiar.”
“Mom was a photographer. This woman is a journalist.”
“Both in the business of truth.” Drak settled back. “Do you trust her?”
“I don’t know her.”
“That is not what I asked.”
Drake opened his mouth to deflect, a skill he’d honed to surgical precision, and found he couldn’t. Not with his father. Not in this room. Drak had a way of stripping conversations to their bones, and Drake had never learned to build the right mask for that.
“My instincts say she’s honest,” he said finally. “But my instincts also say she’ll print whatever she finds, regardless of consequences.”
“Good instincts.” Drak nodded. “The first is a quality. The second is a warning. Hold both.”
Drake left his father’s presence feeling no more settled than when he’d arrived.
He walked through the settlement as evening fires lit one by one, and he tried very hard not to think about the woman in the guest dwelling who saw through his masks and smelled like coconut shampoo and printer ink and something he couldn’t name that made him want to stop walking and start running toward her.
The mate bond. That’s what his cousins called it, the pull, the recognition, the sense that the universe had pointed at a specific person and said yours.
Koroth had described it as a compass in his chest. Brek had called it a forge fire, burning until you gave it something to shape.
Drake’s father had once said, with characteristic brevity, “You will know.”
Drake didn’t want to know. Not now. Not with a journalist who had every reason to destroy everything he was trying to protect.
But the pull was there. Low and steady, like a second heartbeat, oriented toward a stone dwelling at the edge of the settlement where a woman was writing in a notebook about all the things he couldn’t afford to let her see.
He stood on the ridge, the same ridge where she’d found him, and looked at the stars. They didn’t have answers. They never did.
But for the first time in a long time, he found himself hoping that someone might.