MAGNOLIA
The kobold stitches like his life depends on it. Which, based on the look Dash gave him after the silk tried to mummify us both, it might.
I sit on an overturned crate in the corner of the shop, pressing a cold compress Grimshaw tossed me against the rope burn on my forearm.
The silk left matching welts on both of us.
Mine are pink and angry. On Dash's dark green skin, they show up like pale silver rivers, already fading. Orc healing. Must be nice.
My hair is a lost cause. I gave up trying to re-pin it after the third attempt sent a bobby pin pinging off Grimshaw's workbench.
It hangs loose now, tangled and damp at the temples.
My dress, the cute navy swing dress I picked specifically because it made me look put-together and competent for hiring a mercenary, has a six-inch tear along the side seam from where I army-crawled across a cutting table like a marine.
Grimshaw works in silence. The dead silk behaves under his needle. No screaming. No thrashing. Just the quiet, rhythmic punch of thread through fabric, the tiny kobold perched on his platform with his tongue poking between his teeth.
Dash stands in the fitting area, shirtless, arms slightly raised while Grimshaw darts around him pinning the jacket panels in place.
The mercenary's torso is a topographical map of violence.
Scars layered over scars. One thick ridge of raised tissue runs from his left hip, curves around his ribs, and disappears behind his shoulder blade.
A small puncture scar sits dead center of his sternum, perfectly round.
He catches me staring.
I look at the ceiling. Very interesting ceiling. Lots of stalactites.
"Twenty minutes," Grimshaw announces through a mouthful of pins.
Twenty minutes of sitting on a crate in an underground monster market trying not to catalog the exact width of an orc's shoulders.
Fine. I pull out my phone. Fourteen missed calls from my mother.
Twenty-two texts from my sister Petunia, each one progressively more unhinged in its use of exclamation points.
One text from my cousin Beau that just says: Heard you're bringing someone. Craig's here already. Just FYI.
Craig.
My stomach drops three floors.
Craig is already at the Silverleaf Country Club.
Craig, who proposed to me on my twenty-eighth birthday and then un-proposed six weeks later because he'd been sleeping with a CrossFit instructor named Jade.
Craig, who my mother still refers to as "the one that got away" despite the fact that he got away directly into another woman's bed.
Craig, who will be at my sister's wedding because he went to college with the groom and the universe is a vindictive creature with a personal grudge against Magnolia Jenkins.
My fingers tighten around the phone.
"Problem?" Dash rumbles from the fitting platform.
"No."
"Your jaw is clenched hard enough to crack a walnut."
"I have a very strong jaw."
He doesn't push it. Points to Grimshaw go back to stitching.
I shove the phone into my purse. Craig doesn't matter.
That's the whole point. I hired six feet and nine inches of scarred, tusked, weapon-carrying orc mercenary to make Craig not matter.
To make all of them not matter. My mother's sighing.
Petunia's pity. Aunt Delphine's yearly interrogation about my "timeline.
" None of it touches me this weekend. Not with Dash standing next to me, an immovable wall between me and every person who's ever looked at me and seen something incomplete.
"Done." Grimshaw bites through the final thread and hops down from his platform. "Mirror's behind the curtain."
Dash rolls his shoulders once. The jacket settles. He steps down from the fitting platform and walks toward the full-length mirror in the alcove, pulling back the velvet curtain with one hand.
He stops.
I stand up from my crate.
The armor-silk has done something impossible. It has taken this battle-scarred, broken-tusked, weapon-hoarding mercenary and turned him into the most devastating thing I have ever seen in formalwear.
The jacket sits flush across his shoulders, tapering down to his waist in a clean, ruthless line.
The silk is so black it eats light. It moves when he moves, fluid and alive in a way that is no longer aggressive but elegant.
Predatory, even. The collar frames his jaw, his broken tusk, the hard angle of his cheekbone.
The trousers break perfectly over boots that Grimshaw has somehow incorporated into the design, hiding the steel toe caps under a polished leather overlay.
He looks like he could walk into a five-star restaurant and buy it.
He looks like he could walk into a country club and burn it to the ground.
He adjusts his cuff. The silk ripples, accommodating. He turns slightly, examining the side profile, and the jacket pulls across his back in a way that makes something behind my ribs do a very inconvenient somersault.
"The silk fits well," he says. Clinical. Professional. As if he's evaluating the weight distribution of a new breastplate.
Grimshaw crosses his arms and beams up at his creation.
"It accepted her," the kobold mutters again, quiet enough that maybe I'm not supposed to hear.
Dash's eyes find mine in the mirror.
"Will this suffice for the mission parameters?"
My mouth is dry. "Yeah. That'll work."
The mirror throws his reflection back at me and my lungs simply quit. Not a dramatic gasp. Not a flutter. A full system shutdown, like my body has decided oxygen is optional in the presence of whatever this is.
His shoulders fill the frame of the mirror. The silk catches the amber glow of Grimshaw's enchanted lanterns and drinks it, turning the fabric into something liquid, something that moves like a second skin over the architecture of him.
It doesn't look out of place.
It looks like the tuxedo was built around it. Like Grimshaw designed every stitch to frame the brutality of him in silk and call it art.
My fingers grip the crate. The compress slides off my arm and hits the floor with a wet splat. I don't pick it up.
Dash turns from the mirror.
Not quickly. Not with any urgency. He turns the way a predator pivots when it hears something small moving through underbrush. Deliberate. Measured. Each degree of rotation controlled by muscles that could rip the silk clean off his body if he flexed wrong.
He doesn't flex wrong. He moves like the fabric is part of him, and that is so much worse.
One step off the fitting platform. His boot heel strikes the stone floor and the sound reverberates through the cramped shop. Second step. Third. The space between us, which was a comfortable twelve feet when I was on my crate and he was being fitted, shrinks to eight. Six.
Four.
His chin dips. Those deep-set amber eyes lock onto mine and hold, the vertical pupils narrowing to sharp black slits against the gold. Reading me. Assessing me. Running whatever internal tactical calculus mercenaries use when they identify a target's weakness.
I am broadcasting my weakness in high definition.
Three feet. Two.
He stops close enough that I have to tilt my head back to maintain eye contact.
My neck cranes at an angle that is frankly ridiculous.
The top of my skull reaches his collarbone.
I know this because his collarbone is right there, framed by the silk collar, a ridge of skin pulled taut over bone thick enough to stop a blade.
He lifts his left hand.
My heart detonates.
He adjusts his cuff.
Slowly. Precisely. His thick fingers find the silk where it meets his wrist and roll it a quarter inch, smoothing the fabric over the corded muscle of his forearm.
The motion is small. Surgical. The kind of movement a man makes when he is completely aware of every inch of space his body occupies and wants you to be aware of it too.
The silver scar tissue on his forearm catches the light as the silk shifts. Rope burns from the fitting. Already half-healed. The new marks layer over old ones, pale lines crossing skin in a pattern that tells a story I don't have clearance to read.
He switches to the right cuff.
Same motion. Same devastating precision. His wrist rotates, the tendons shift under his skin, and the silk obeys him now. Not a ripple of resistance. The fabric that tried to strangle us both twenty minutes ago lays flat and docile under his fingers like it wouldn't dare.
"Your heart rate is elevated."
The words drop between us. Low. Matter-of-fact. The observation of a professional assessing environmental conditions.
"I just wrestled sentient fabric."
"That was twelve minutes ago."
"I'm a slow recoverer."
His head tilts. One degree. His nostrils flare once, just barely, and something about the way his pupils dilate tells me orcs can smell things humans can't. Things like adrenaline. Like the blood rushing hot and stupid under my skin.
"Your pupils are dilated," he adds.
"It's dark in here."
"There are nine light sources in this room."
I count them. There are nine light sources in this room.
"Fine. You clean up well. Is that a crime?"
Something shifts in his expression. Not a smile.
His mouth doesn't move. But the skin around his eyes changes, tightens, and those gold irises get warmer by a fraction of a degree.
The orc equivalent of a smirk, maybe. Or a threat assessment downgrade.
I don't know. I can't read orc facial expressions.
I can barely read human ones. Craig smiled at me every morning for two years and I never once read the lie behind it.
"Noted," Dash says. He reaches past me for the weapon harness draped over the crate where I was sitting.
His arm enters my peripheral vision and the heat radiating off his skin hits my bare shoulder like opening an oven door.
He smells like iron and leather and something underneath, something warm and deep, like cedar bark split open.