Chapter Eight
Drake
The rhythm they’d built was dangerous.
Not dangerous in the way the council feared—Harper publishing classified information, compromising sources, exposing vulnerabilities.
She was too good for that. Her instincts for what to protect and what to expose were as sharp as Fenris’s, and Drake had begun to trust her judgment in a way that would have alarmed him if he’d stopped to think about it.
The danger was personal. Intimate. The kind that lived in the half-second when their fingers touched over a shared document.
In the way she said his name—just Drake, never the title, like she was talking to the real person underneath.
In the arguments that left him breathless and alert and wanting to kiss the exact point where her jaw met her neck, right where a tendon pulled taut when she was making a particularly lethal point.
He was losing his mind. He was also doing some of the best strategic work of his career, because Harper’s relentlessness demanded it.
She didn’t let him hide behind diplomatic language or strategic ambiguity.
She wanted precision. She wanted truth. She wanted the real version of everything, and she pulled it out of him word by word, argument by argument, until he felt scraped clean and somehow more himself than he’d been in years.
He was thinking about this, about her, specifically about the way she twisted her pen between her fingers when she was solving a problem, when Varek found him.
* * *
The clan gathering was a monthly tradition.
The entire settlement convened in the central square for food, music, and the communal bonding that kept a small community from fracturing.
Drake usually enjoyed these, they were a chance to be among his people without the weight of official duties, to eat his Aunt Zoe’s cooking and listen to Shala’s stories and watch the children chase each other through the firelight.
Tonight, the gathering had an edge. Everyone knew about the journalist. Everyone had opinions. And Varek, who had an unerring instinct for the dramatic moment, chose the height of the evening to make his.
Drake was standing near the fire pit, holding a plate of food he hadn’t eaten, watching Harper interview a group of young orcs who were explaining the settlement’s apprenticeship system with the earnest enthusiasm of people who loved their work.
She was good at this, the casual interview, the conversational extraction.
She made people feel heard, and they rewarded her with honesty.
It was, Drake recognized, a form of the same charm he used in diplomatic settings, but hers was more honest. She actually cared about the answers.
Varek’s voice cut through the crowd noise like a blade through silk.
“The prince brings a human journalist into our secrets.”
The square didn’t go silent. That would have been merciful. Instead, conversations stuttered and died in ripples, leaving Varek’s voice exposed in a growing pool of attention.
Drake turned slowly. Varek stood twenty feet away, flanked by two of his warriors, his scarified arms crossed over his chest. His posture wasn’t aggressive. It was something worse: disappointed. The disappointment of a man who believed in something deeply and was watching it be undermined.
“His father trusted one human woman, and it changed our world,” Varek continued, his deep voice carrying without effort.
“But his father was a warrior. His father proved himself with blood and sacrifice and the kind of strength that cannot be learned in a human classroom.” He looked at Drake with those steady, certain eyes.
“What are you, son of Drak? A warrior? Or a man who has read about warriors?”
The square was silent now.
Drake felt every eye on him. Felt the weight of forty years of his father’s leadership pressing on his shoulders.
Felt the crack that Varek’s words always found, the same crack, the same fear, the same question he’d carried since he was old enough to notice that his cousins were bigger, stronger, more undeniably orc than he would ever be.
He kept his face composed. That was the mask. That was what Georgetown had given him, not knowledge, not connections, but the ability to stand before a hostile room and show nothing.
“I am what this clan needs me to be,” he said. “Tonight, that’s the man coordinating our defense against a government that wants to take our home. Tomorrow, it might be something else. I’m not interested in proving what I am to anyone. I’m interested in protecting what we have.”
It was a good answer. Measured, strategic, deflecting the personal attack into a communal concern. The crowd seemed satisfied. Varek inclined his head, not agreement, but acknowledgment, and stepped back.
Drake held his composure for seven more minutes. He circulated. He smiled. He ate food that tasted like ash.
Then he walked to the forge.
* * *
The forge was dark and empty at this hour. Brek’s apprentices had gone to the gathering, leaving behind the cooling embers and the smell of hot metal. The space was cavernous, high ceilings, stone walls, an anvil at the center that had been shaped by his uncle’s hands for three decades.
Drake hit the workbench.
Not with the berserker fury that ran in Koroth’s blood. Not with the calculated violence of a warrior in combat. He hit it because the sound it made was louder than the voice in his head, and the pain in his knuckles was more manageable than the pain in his chest.
The wood cracked. He hit it again. Again. His green-gray fists left divots in the oak surface, splinters embedding in his skin, and it wasn’t enough. The word echoed, Varek’s word, the crowd’s silence, the question that had no good answer.
What are you?
Not orc enough for the traditionalists. Not human enough for Georgetown.
Not a warrior like Koroth, not a healer like Theron, not a shadow like Fenris.
He was the diplomat. The polished one. The one who could walk into any room and become what it needed, which sounded like a strength until you realized it meant you had no self to return to when the room emptied.
He hit the bench again and the top split in two.
“Hey.”
Harper’s voice. Behind him, in the doorway, where she had no business being because she should have been at the gathering, interviewing people, building her story, doing anything other than following a half-orc prince into a dark forge to watch him fall apart.
“Hey.” Closer now. Her footsteps deliberate on the stone floor, approaching the way you approach something wounded. “Look at me.”
He didn’t turn. His hands were bleeding. His composure was in splinters on the floor, mixed with the oak.
She came around in front of him. Planted herself between him and the ruined bench, tilting her face up to his.
In the ember-glow, her eyes were liquid dark, and there was no recorder in her hand, no notebook, nothing between them but the raw honesty of a woman who had decided, in this moment, to be something other than a journalist.
She took his hands. Both of them. Her fingers were slim and warm, wrapping around his bleeding knuckles, and the contact sent a current through him that had nothing to do with the mate bond and everything to do with the simple, disarming act of being touched by someone who chose to touch you.
“What Varek said was bullshit,” she said. “You know that, right?”
“Do I?” The words came out raw. Stripped of diplomacy, strategy, every mask he’d ever worn. Just a man in the dark, holding a woman’s hands, asking a question he didn’t know the answer to.
“Yes.” Harper’s grip tightened. “Strength isn’t just fists, Drake. Your father knew that. He married a photographer, not a warrior. He built this settlement with treaties and alliances and the willingness to trust people who were different from him. That’s his legacy. That’s what he passed to you.”
“Varek would say that’s the human talking.”
“Varek can’t see past his own grief to recognize that the world changed whether he wanted it to or not.
You, ” She stepped closer. Too close. Her face was inches from his and he could smell the woodsmoke in her hair and the faint sweetness of whatever she used on her skin and the sharp, clean scent that was just her.
“You are exactly what this clan needs. Not in spite of your human half. Because of it.”
The moment stretched like a wire. His hands in hers. Her face tilted up. The mate bond roaring in his chest, demanding, insistent, undeniable. He wanted to kiss her so badly his teeth ached.
But the image of Varek’s disappointed eyes was still fresh.
The prince brings a human journalist into our secrets.
If Drake kissed her now, if he gave in to the bond, to the pull, to this terrifying, gorgeous, relentless woman, it would prove everything the traditionalists believed.
That he was too human. That his judgment was compromised.
That the prince had fallen for the reporter and lost himself entirely.
He eased his hands from hers. Gently. It cost him everything.
“Thank you,” he said. His voice was rough. “For saying that.”
Harper’s expression shifted, a flicker of hurt, quickly controlled, replaced by something that looked like understanding. She was good at controlling her face too. They were both so good at hiding.
“Anytime,” she said. “It’s the truth. And I deal in truth.”
She left the forge. Drake stood among the embers and the splinters and the ghost of her warmth on his skin, and he pressed his bleeding hands flat against the cool stone wall and breathed.