Chapter Six
Drake
The emergency council session convened within the hour.
Drake had been awake since three. Not by choice—the bond had woken him, a restless pulse behind his sternum that he’d learned to recognize as proximity awareness.
Somewhere in the settlement, Harper Stone was awake too, and some part of Drake’s physiology had decided that this information was important enough to override sleep.
He’d spent the pre-dawn hours at his desk reviewing the Operation Reclamation document for the seventh time.
Each reading revealed new implications—the framework wasn’t just a plan to shrink Ironpeak’s borders.
It was a template. Adaptable. Scalable. Designed to be applied to any supernatural territory the government decided was inconvenient.
Whoever had drafted it understood environmental law at a level that suggested government attorneys, not political appointees.
Drake stood at the head of the table because sitting felt impossible.
Adrenaline still hummed through his veins, not from danger, but from the look on Harper Stone’s face when she’d pulled that memory card from her phone and tucked it somewhere he absolutely could not retrieve it.
The audacity. The sheer, brass-boned audacity of this woman.
He was furious. He was also, if he was being honest with himself in this private corner of his mind where honesty was still allowed, impressed.
The council chamber held only four people.
Drak, sitting in his carved chair with the stillness of a man who had survived enough crises to know that panic was a luxury.
Koroth, leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed, radiating the kind of contained violence that made the air feel heavier.
And Fenris, who had materialized in the chamber the way he always did, suddenly, silently, as if doors were a suggestion rather than a requirement.
“The document is called Operation Reclamation,” Drake said, laying his phone on the table with the photographed pages displayed.
He’d taken his own images before confiscating Harper’s phone.
“Department of the Interior. It outlines a legal framework for reducing our sovereign territory using environmental protection statutes as cover.”
Koroth’s jaw tightened. “We knew they were planning something. This is the something.”
“The question,” Drak said, his voice carrying the gravity of stone settling, “is how it ended up in our archive.”
Fenris stepped forward. “I have two theories. The first: someone inside the settlement obtained the document through their own channels and filed it incorrectly. Carelessness, not malice. The second, ” He paused, and the pause said more than the words.
“Someone placed it there deliberately. A plant. Designed to be found by exactly the kind of person who’d go looking. ”
“A journalist,” Drake said.
“A journalist,” Fenris confirmed. “If Stone had found that document and published it without context, it could have been framed as proof that we’re stealing government intelligence. Paranoid orcs hoarding classified materials. It’s the kind of story that writes itself in the wrong hands.”
The silence that followed held both strategy and violence. With this particular group, it could go either way.
Drake spoke first. “We control the narrative. Give her a curated version of the truth, the conspiracy, the threats, our evidence. Let her platform work for us.”
Koroth pushed off the wall. “Or we send her home. Now. Before she publishes anything. Deny everything.” His voice was flat, practical, the voice of a war chief measuring threats. “She’s a journalist, Drake. Her loyalty is to the story, not to us.”
“Feed her disinformation,” Fenris offered, because Fenris always offered the complicated option. “Give her something false alongside something true. See where the false piece surfaces. We trace it back to whoever planted the original document.”
All three looked at Drak.
The old chief had been listening the way mountains listen, impassive, unhurried, absorbing everything.
He pressed both hands flat on the arms of his chair and pushed himself to standing.
It cost him more than it once had, and Drake’s chest ached watching it, the way it always did when his father’s body betrayed the spirit still burning inside.
“Bring her to me,” Drak said.
“Father, ”
“I said bring her to me.” Drak’s gaze settled on his son with the weight of forty years of leadership. “I will speak with her. I will look her in the eye and decide what she is.”
“The stress, ” Drake started.
“I have been chief for forty years. I negotiated the treaty that protects this settlement. I stood down soldiers and survived wars and buried friends whose names are carved on that wall.” Drak’s voice was iron. “I can handle one journalist.”
Drake closed his mouth. There were arguments you won against Drak, son of the mountain, Chief of Ironpeak. This was not one of them.
* * *
He retrieved Harper from her quarters.
She opened the door already dressed for battle, clean blouse, pressed slacks, chin lifted.
Her eyes went to his empty hands, cataloguing the absence of her confiscated phone, then to his face, reading whatever she found there with the focused precision he was beginning to associate with everything she did.
“My father wants to speak with you,” he said.
Something flickered across her expression. Surprise, maybe. Or wariness. “The chief.”
“The chief.”
She didn’t ask why. She didn’t negotiate conditions. She reached for a jacket, slipped what he was certain was a notebook into an interior pocket, and stepped out beside him.
They walked through the settlement in silence.
It was morning, early, the air still carrying the cold bite of mountain dawn, and the paths were quiet.
Drake was acutely aware of her beside him.
The mate bond had intensified overnight, which shouldn’t have been possible given that they’d argued and she’d hidden classified data in her undergarments and he’d confiscated her phone.
The bond did not, apparently, care about jurisdictional disputes.
He could feel her heartbeat. Not hear it, feel it, like a second pulse layered beneath his own, slightly faster, steady with the controlled calm of a woman walking into an unknown situation with her armor on.
“You should know,” he said as they approached his parents’ dwelling, “my father does not negotiate. He decides. Whatever he offers you, it will be final. There won’t be a second conversation.”
Harper’s stride didn’t break. “Good. I don’t negotiate either.”
Of course you don’t.
He delivered her to the doorway. Emma was waiting inside, she’d know, because Emma always knew, because she’d spent the better part of three decades reading the subtle atmospheric shifts that preceded her husband’s decisions.
Drake watched Harper step inside. He watched his father, legendary, weathered, the orc who had changed history, rise from his chair to greet a five-foot-seven journalist from Atlanta with the grave courtesy he reserved for heads of state and worthy opponents.
Drak extended his hand. An orc custom, adopted from humans, given back with an orc’s weight.
“Ms. Stone. Sit. We have things to discuss.”
Harper took his hand. Drake watched the handshake, her slim brown fingers disappearing into his father’s massive green ones, and felt two things simultaneously.
Relief. Because his father would tell the truth, and the truth was their best weapon.
And terror. Because Harper Stone was in this now. The story, the danger, all of it. And somewhere in the space between her handshake and his heartbeat, Drake understood that keeping her safe had become more important to him than any narrative he’d ever tried to control.
That realization should have alarmed him. Instead, it settled into his bones with the quiet certainty of something that had always been true and was only now being named.