3. Layla
LAYLA
He told me to stay. So, I stay.
Not because I’m obedient. Because my legs have stopped working, and the iron gates leading to the Commander’s home are locked. But even if they weren’t, where else would I go? Back to the Lottery floor? Not a chance.
He had pointed to the bed, but I press my spine against the wall and slide down until my tailbone hits the floor stone. The tattered silk dress pools around me.
Breathe, Layla. Just breathe.
His home is not what I expected. I expected a trophy wall of skulls or a rack of weapons dripping with bodily fluids I’d rather not name.
The single-room quarters are enormous and spartan. Vaulted ceilings lost in shadow, walls of rough-hewn stone that absorb the blue-veined light that pulses through the Bastion.
In the back is a small kitchenette and a sitting room.
A giant, platformed bed dominates one wall, piled with dark furs that look surprisingly comfortable.
A heavy desk sits near the far corner, its surface buried under rolled blueprints and sketches and handwritten notes.
Guard schedules are pinned to the wall above it in neat columns, the handwriting precise and angular.
There are also books. A shelf carved into the stone holds dozens of them, their spines cracked and soft from use.
I push myself to standing and cross the room without thinking, my fingers finding the nearest spine.
The leather is warm, worn smooth by hands far larger than mine.
I tilt the book to read the title embossed in faded gold.
Structural Engineering of Warded Enclosures.
I almost laugh. It catches in my throat and comes out closer to a sob, and I shove it back down before it can escape.
This isn’t a monster’s lair.
This is a military officer’s study. A thinker’s room. The air smells of old leather and ink and the warm, musky scent of the Commander himself. My traitorous body registers the atmosphere as warmth and safety. Not as a threat.
Which is insane. Because the creature who lives here just dragged me through the Bastion by my arm, ordered me to stay, and locked me inside like a criminal.
I’m still holding the book when the front door opens.
Every muscle in my body tenses, and the book slips from my fingers and hits the ground with a dull thud.
Krog fills the doorway entirely, his shoulders nearly brushing both sides of the frame, and the air in the room feels hot in a way that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the presence of him.
He steps inside, the door closing behind him.
My survival instincts tell me to press against the wall again, to make myself small, to hide. But my eyes catch the dark red splatters of blood across his chest, and I step forward instead.
“You’re hurt.”
The words leave my mouth tight and involuntary, the tone between an accusation and concern that I don’t have time to examine because Krog looks down at himself—at the blood drying in dark streaks across the plates of his armor, crusted into the creases of his knuckles, flecked across his jaw—and his expression shifts.
He looks pleased that I noticed. “The blood is not mine.”
A chill sweeps through me, sharp and cold, starting at the base of my skull and racing down my spine. But it’s followed by something darker that coils low in my belly with a heat I don’t want to name.
“Whose is it?” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
“It belonged to Goros. The guard who struck you.”
Belonged.
Past tense. As if Goros simply ceased to exist, and Krog merely finalized an administrative process. The finality of the word is terrifying.
“You killed him?” I hear myself ask. The guard who backhanded me across the face hard enough to split my lip is dead, and the monster standing in front of me—covered in that guard’s blood—is the one who likely ended his life. “Just for hitting me?”
Krog’s amber eyes fix on mine. Those vertical pupils contract, sharpen, and for a moment I see the beast inside, the monster that operates on instinct and violence and a logic so alien it makes my skin prickle.
“Yes,” Krog says, his voice a low grind of stone on stone. “He hurt what is mine.”
The words land in my chest. First a punch, then a grip that wraps around my ribs and squeezes.
Krog killed Goros because the guard struck me.
It’s not punishment for the sake of morality.
It’s because of territory. Property. The same instinct that makes a wolf tear apart anything that threatens its den.
This should horrify me more than it does. But underneath the horror, buried so deep I almost can’t reach it, is a thought I will never, ever say out loud.
No one has ever killed for me before.
Maybe this thought makes me the real monster. Or maybe living in the Wastes rewired my moral compass.
In the Wastes, people kill to take from you. Your food, your water, your body. They kill because you have something they want and taking it is easier than asking. Eloise and I survived for three years by being faster and smarter and more willing to run than the things that hunted us.
But this is violence carried out on my behalf. A wall of muscle and teeth and claws pointed at a target other than me or my sister. And for a woman who has spent years being hunted, the idea of something hunting for her is…
Stop it, Layla. Don’t even finish that thought.
I swallow hard. Force my spine straight and my voice to work. “So, anyone who touches me in the wrong way dies?”
Krog nods. “Yes.”
No hesitation. No qualification. Just confirmation delivered with the same flatness he might use to confirm the weather.
I don’t have a response to that. I’m not sure one exists in any language.
Krog crosses to a metal compartment built into the wall—a storage unit of some kind—and retrieves a foil packet. He turns back to me and holds it out. A ration bar. Dense, dark, the kind of calorie-packed brick they distribute in the dorms every morning.
“Eat.”
My stomach clenches. Not with hunger, but with a knot of adrenaline and dread and that other thing I’m refusing to name. The heat that’s been coiling low in my belly since he walked in covered in blood and told me it wasn’t his.
“I’m not hungry.”
Another growl rumbles through his chest, low and frustrated, and I brace myself for what happens next.
He doesn’t force the bar into my hands. Instead, he lowers himself, bending at the knees until his face is level with mine. The movement is deliberate. Careful. He is making himself smaller, and the absurdity of a seven-foot-tall orc trying to seem less threatening almost breaks me.
“You are too small.” His eyes flick over me, clinical, assessing, noticing every sharp angle and hollow where there should be softness. “Malnourished. You need sustenance.”
The words are blunt and graceless and delivered with the bedside manner of a field medic, and somehow that’s what changes my mind.
Not the blood or the killing or the locked gate or the possessive growl. It’s this, the way he looks at me like I might break, the way his voice drops half an octave when he tells me I need sustenance, as if my thinness is a personal failing he intends to correct.
I take the ration bar.
His shoulders drop a fraction of an inch in relief. The orc warlord who just executed a guard with his bare claws is relieved that I accepted a ration bar. Warmth flutters in my chest.
Tearing open the foil, I bite into it. As expected, it tastes similar to compressed sawdust and vitamins. But it’s food, and my body remembers what food means even if my brain is still short-circuiting.
I chew and swallow until the bar is gone without looking at him. Because if I look at him, I’ll see the blood again and be forced to reconcile with the fact that it doesn’t horrify me as much as it should.
Krog straightens with a soft grunt and stands, towering over me. “I must clean.”
Then his gaze shifts to me. Those amber eyes track from my dust-covered dress to the sweat-matted hair clinging to my neck, and his expression tightens. Not displeasure. Something more primal.
“You smell of Goros and the fear that permeates the Great Hall,” he says all matter-of-fact. He jerks his chin toward an archway carved into the far wall. Beyond it, I can see the edge of a stone tub. “Wash.”
Relief floods through me so fast it makes my knees wobble. A bath sounds amazing. Hot water. A chance to relax. Privacy. I nod, moving toward the bathing chamber on rubbery legs.
Behind me are footsteps. Heavy and deliberate. I spin around.
Krog is following me into the bathing chamber, his thick fingers already working to remove his armor. One clasp falls away, then the other, and he starts to remove the bloody chest plate.
“What are you doing?” I ask, stopping him.
He looks at me like the question doesn’t make sense. “Undressing to get clean.”
I guess nudity and co-bathing are no big deal in the Bastion because his chest plate comes away in a single piece then he kicks off his boots.
The sight of his bare torso takes my breath away.
Green skin is stretched taut over slabs of muscle that shift and bunch with every movement.
Crisscrossed scars, pale raised ridges that map decades of violence mark his chest, ribs, and abdomen.
A deep gouge that runs diagonally from his left shoulder to his right hip, healed but savage, the kind of wound that would have killed a human man.
His waist narrows to hips wrapped in leather breeches that ride low, and the V of muscle there disappears beneath the waistband, pointing to a massive bulge I should absolutely not be looking at.
But I am looking. My traitorous eyes are taking in every ridge, every scar, every impossible inch of him. And my stupid, survival-hardened, touch-starved body responds with a flush of heat that climbs from my chest to my throat to my cheeks.
He reaches for the laces of his breeches. “Wait—” I throw up a hand, my voice cracking. “You can’t just—we’re not—I’m not—”
Krog pauses. Tilts his head. Gives me that predator-assessing-prey look again, the one that makes me feel like he’s decoding a species he doesn’t understand.
“The tub is big enough for two,” he says, as if the problem is logistics.
He reaches past me and turns on the faucet which begins to fill the stone tub with steaming water. The sound echoes off the chamber walls, filling the air with misty warmth.
Then, he resumes undressing. Which is both horrifying and confusing.
I’m standing in a bathing chamber with an orc who’s about to get naked while steam curls around us.
“Krog, seriously, I—”
Ignoring me, he shucks the leather breeches down his thighs and kicks them aside with a heavy thud.
The air leaves the room, then my chest. I stop breathing, stop thinking, stop functioning entirely.
He is...naked. Completely, unapologetically naked.
And he is huge.
I’m not just talking about his height or the width of his shoulders.
His cock is thick and heavy, swinging slightly with the movement of his hips as he steps toward the tub.
Even in its flaccid state it looks like a club.
A bludgeon wrapped in dark green velvet and veins, resting against thighs that are thick as tree trunks.
My brain tries to do the math, the physics of that fitting inside me. and comes up with a single, terrifying error message: Abort.
If he forces himself on me, he’ll tear me in half.
“Get undressed,” he says.
But I take a frantic step back, my back hitting the doorframe. “I can’t.”
Krog pauses at the edge of the tub, with one leg already in the water. He looks at me, drops his gaze to where I’m staring, then looks back at my face. He doesn’t look embarrassed. He doesn’t look aroused. He looks...indifferent.
“You are dirty,” he rumbles, the sound vibrating through the steam. “I am dirty. The water is warm. I will not hurt you.”
He steps further into the tub and sinks down, the water level rising to engulf him, leaving me standing in the doorway with my heart hammering against my ribs.
He’s literally a lethal monster who just killed a man for touching me. And now he wants me to get in the water with him.
I swallow the acid taste of fear in my throat, my fingers trembling as I reach for the ties of my ruined silk dress.