Chapter Twenty
Drake
Drake called the emergency session with a voice that shook the council chamber’s stone walls.
He didn’t knock. He didn’t send messengers.
He walked through the settlement at a pace that made people step aside and warriors reach for weapons, because the look on his face was one the clan had never seen on the diplomatic prince and instinctively recognized as something far more dangerous: a chief going to war.
The council assembled in seven minutes. Drak, leaning on his cane. Koroth, who’d arrived with a blade he hadn’t bothered to conceal. Fenris, materialized from wherever Fenris existed between appearances. Varek, flanked by his warriors. Carmen, Theron, the elders. Everyone.
Drake stood at the center of the chamber. Not behind the table. Not at the diplomatic podium. At the center, the way a chief stood when the matter was beyond negotiation.
“Tonight, two individuals breached our settlement security, entered a guest dwelling, and stole classified materials. They specifically targeted the journalist Harper Stone’s documentation of the conspiracy against our people.
” His voice was level, each word weighted with the precision of a man who had spent weeks being careful and was done.
“They knew what to take and where to find it. They were inside our perimeter without triggering a single alarm. Which means one of two things: either our security has been compromised from outside, or it was compromised from within.”
He let the implication settle. The chamber was silent in a way that had texture—dense, electric, the silence of three hundred years of orc history watching from the carved walls.
“I am not accusing anyone in this room.” Drake looked at Varek. Directly. Without the diplomatic buffer he’d always maintained. “But I am done being diplomatic about the fact that someone in this settlement is working against us. Against all of us. And I will find them.”
Varek rose. The chamber tensed. Drake didn’t flinch.
“The prince speaks true.” Varek’s deep voice carried through the chamber like a drum strike.
“I am a traditionalist. I have questioned the prince’s methods.
I have challenged his fitness to lead. But I am not a traitor.
” He turned to his warriors. “No one under my command would betray this clan to the humans who seek to destroy it. My warriors will join the search for the mole. Immediately.”
For the first time, Varek and Drake occupied the same side of a divide.
Drake felt the shift—not just political but something deeper.
Acknowledgment. Varek had watched Drake command this room the way a chief commanded, not with charm or diplomacy but with the raw authority of a man defending his people.
And Varek, who valued strength above all, had recognized it.
Fenris worked fast. Within two hours, his network traced the breach to a young orc named Talven, barely twenty, a perimeter guard recruited by one of Mercer’s operatives six months ago.
The kid had been promised that cooperation would protect the clan from the worst of the government’s plans.
He’d been told he was saving lives, that the information he passed would help the government understand the orcs and find a peaceful solution.
The lies were expertly tailored to exploit his fear.
He sat in the holding chamber with tears on his face and terror in his eyes.
Varek stood behind Drake during the interrogation, his massive arms crossed.
When Talven broke down completely, sobbing, apologizing, begging, Varek’s jaw tightened with fury directed not at the boy but at the people who had used him.
“You will tell us everything,” Drake said.
Not unkindly. Not weakly. With the measured authority of a man who understood that justice required holding two truths simultaneously: that betrayal had consequences and that compassion was not weakness.
“Every contact, every instruction, every piece of information you passed. And then this ends. You are clan, Talven. You made a mistake born of fear. I understand fear.” His voice hardened. “But betrayal ends tonight.”
Varek looked at Drake with an expression the prince had never seen directed at him: genuine recognition. Drake had handled the boy the way Drak would have, with the authority of a chief and the mercy of a father.
Talven talked for two hours. The laptop was at a dead drop three miles from the settlement, scheduled for pickup at dawn. Fenris’s scouts intercepted it within the hour, along with a Mercer operative who’d been waiting.
Harper had her story back.
* * *
Drake went to her that night.
Not with an apology for their fight, they had both been right and both been wrong, and the truth of that would take time to articulate.
Not with a strategic update, Fenris had already briefed her on the recovery of her materials.
He went because the mate bond was done with patience, done with politics, done with every careful calculation that had kept them circling each other like binary stars, close enough to feel the gravity, too cautious to collide.
He went because when he’d stood in that council chamber and commanded with his father’s voice, when he’d faced Varek without flinching and handled Talven with both justice and mercy, he’d felt something shift inside himself, the tectonic movement of a man finding his own foundation.
He was orc enough. Not despite his human education or his diplomatic instincts or his Georgetown vocabulary.
Because of them. Because being a bridge required standing on both shores, and that took a strength the traditionalists had never needed and therefore never understood.
Harper opened the door. Her eyes were red-rimmed. Her jaw was set.
He didn’t speak. He crossed the threshold in one stride, took her face in both hands, and kissed her with everything he’d been holding back since the day she’d called his performance a performance and cracked his world open.
This was not the tender discovery of their first night together, or the raw vulnerability of their second.
This was claiming. This was the orc prince letting the orc free, the growl that vibrated through her body, the hands that gripped her hips and lifted her against him as if she weighed nothing, the possessive urgency of a male whose mate had been threatened.
“Don’t hold back,” Harper whispered, her legs wrapped around his waist, her hands fisted in his hair. “I’m not fragile and you are not too much.”
He didn’t hold back.
He pinned her against the wall beside the door, his mouth devouring hers, swallowing her gasp as the cold stone hit her back.
One hand tangled in her hair, the other gripping the back of her thigh hard enough to bruise.
She arched into him and he ground his hips forward, pressing the thick ridge of his cock between her thighs through their clothes, and the friction wrung a moan from her that he felt in his spine.
“Do you know what these weeks have been?” he said against her mouth, his hips rolling.
“The trial. The council. Varek in my face telling me I’m not orc enough.
” Another roll, harder, and she gasped. “And the entire time, while I was fighting for my right to lead, for our right to exist, all I could think about was getting back to you and reminding us both who I belong to.”
“Show me,” she said. “Stop talking about it and show me.”
He ripped her shirt over her head. Not carefully, the seam at the shoulder tore and neither of them cared.
Her bra followed, and then his mouth was on her breasts, rough and demanding, sucking one pink nipple until she cried out and then biting down, not gently, not carefully, and the sharp shock of his teeth made her hips buck against him so hard he nearly lost his grip on her.
She yanked his shirt off, her nails raking down his chest, and the scratch marks she left across his green-gray skin felt like a brand. Like a claim. He wanted more.
“Mark me,” he growled. “Leave evidence. I want to feel you on my skin tomorrow when I’m being diplomatic and restrained and everything I’m not right now.”
She bit his shoulder. Hard. And the sound that ripped from his chest, a snarl so deep and animal it barely qualified as vocalization, made her clench her thighs around him and grind down.
He carried her to the bed, dropped her on it, and stripped her remaining clothes off with the ruthless efficiency of a man who’d run out of patience six hours ago. Then he shoved his own pants down, kicked them away, and stood over her.
She looked up at him. Naked, panting, her eyes blazing with the same fire he felt in his blood. Her gaze dropped to his cock, hard and thick and jutting from his body, a bead of moisture glistening at the tip, and the hunger in her expression made him growl.
“Turn over,” he said.
Her eyes widened. They’d been face to face before. Tender. Connected. Eye contact and whispered names and forehead to forehead. This was different. This was the orc, and the orc wanted to claim his mate from behind, his body covering hers, his teeth at her neck, his hips driving deep.
She turned over.
He was on her in a heartbeat. His chest against her back, his cock pressed hot and hard against the curve of her ass, his mouth at the nape of her neck.
She pushed back against him and the feel of her body pressed along the full length of his, skin on skin, her softness against his hardness, the size of him dwarfing her in a way that made something protective and possessive roar to life in his blood, shattered any remaining pretense of civilization.
He reached between her legs from behind and found her soaked.
His fingers slid through her slickness and she moaned into the pillow, her hips pressing back against his hand.
He worked two fingers inside her, curling them forward, feeling the hot grip of her body while his thumb pressed against her clit.