9. Magnolia
MAGNOLIA
The world bounces with every step he takes.
His shoulder is a slab of warm granite against my stomach, and each stride covers what would take me three steps.
The country club hallways blur past upside down.
Crystal chandeliers. Horrified guests. A waiter carrying a tower of shrimp cocktails who flattens himself against the wall as Dash barrels through.
"People are staring," I hiss.
"Good."
"Dash, I have legs."
"Noted."
His hand tightens on the back of my thigh.
Not to restrain. To secure. Like I'm something precious he's extracted from a combat zone and he will not set down until he reaches a defensible position.
My vintage dress is bunched somewhere around my hips.
The blood from his thorn wounds is soaking through my cardigan.
He smells like crushed hedge and hot iron.
We pass the lobby. The snooty receptionist opens her mouth. Dash doesn't even glance at her. Just walks. The purposeful, ground-eating stride of someone who has carried heavier things through worse places.
My mother stands near the elevators with Aunt Geneva. They both have matching expressions of frozen, porcelain shock. Aunt Geneva's hand drifts to her pearl necklace.
"Magnolia Renee Jenkins, what on earth..."
"Good night, Mama."
That's all I get out before Dash rounds the corner and takes the stairs. Two at a time. I grip the back of his shirt and my teeth rattle.
Third floor. He kicks the door to our hallway open with his heel. Not hard enough to break it. Just hard enough that it slams into the wall and bounces.
Room 314. He stops. One large hand digs into his pocket for the key while the other arm pins me in place across his shoulder like I weigh absolutely nothing, like I'm a sack of bread flour, like gravity is a suggestion he's chosen to ignore.
The door opens. He ducks through the frame. Kicks it shut behind us.
Sets me down.
My feet hit the floor and I stumble backward, catching myself on the tiny bed.
The room is ridiculous. The dismantled wardrobe pieces lean against the wall.
His makeshift floor pallet takes up every inch of remaining space.
The single bedside lamp throws warm gold across his face and all that green skin.
He's wrecked.
The armor-silk shirt hangs in ribbons. Thorns bristle from his forearms like a porcupine's back. A thin line of green blood runs from his temple to his jaw. Sap glows faintly on his knuckles.
And he's breathing hard. Not from exertion. From something else. Something coiled and deliberate behind his ribs that makes the tendons in his neck stand out like bridge cables.
"What did you say to Mark?"
"Contract details. Classified."
"Dash."
"I discussed kneecap anatomy."
"Oh my God."
I press both hands to my face. My palms are shaking. Not from fear. From adrenaline that has nowhere to go, a live wire sparking in my heart, and the room is so small. The room is catastrophically small. He fills every corner of it.
"You're bleeding."
"Superficial."
"Sit down and let me look."
He doesn't sit. He stands there, a mountain in a destroyed tuxedo, and something in his expression cracks. Just a fraction. A hairline fracture in all that professional stoicism.
"He cornered you." Low. Rough. "In the dark. Alone."
"I handled it."
"You shouldn't have to handle anything. That's what the contract..."
"Forget the contract for five seconds!"
The words leave my mouth before I can catch them. They hit the air between us and detonate.
Silence.
His jaw flexes. The muscle jumps twice.
I reach for the tiny first aid kit from the bathroom and close the distance between us. Three steps. That's all this room allows. I'm standing directly in front of him and my head barely clears his collarbone. I pull the first thorn from his forearm.
He hisses through his teeth.
"Baby."
"That one was barbed."
I pull another. Green blood wells up, dark and warm against my fingertips.
His skin is rougher than human skin. Thicker.
The scars on his arms are layered so dense they create their own topography, a braille history of every fight he's walked away from.
I trace around a particularly savage one near his wrist while reaching for the next thorn.
His hand catches mine.
Wraps around it completely. My entire fist disappears inside his grip.
"Magnolia."
My name in his mouth sounds different than it's ever sounded in anyone else's. Heavier. Like it has weight and texture. Like it means something specific in a language I don't speak.
I look up.
His pupils are blown wide. The gold ring of his irises is almost gone, swallowed by black. His pulse hammers visibly in his throat.
"This isn't in the contract," he says.
"What isn't?"
His thumb drags across my knuckles. Slow. Deliberate.
"Any of it."
The first aid kit hits the floor.
I don't pick it up.
The first aid kit spills antiseptic wipes and tiny adhesive bandages across the floor like confetti. We don’t move to collect them.
His thumb is still on my knuckles. That single point of contact hums through my skeleton. The lamp flickers. Outside, someone in the hallway laughs, high and champagne-drunk, and the sound belongs to a different universe entirely.
"You built yourself a bed on the floor," I say.
"Affirmative."
"Out of a wardrobe."
"The mahogany was structurally sound."
I look down at his construction project.
He'd stripped the wardrobe into planks and laid them flat, then folded a single country club towel on top as a mattress.
A towel. For a six-foot-nine Orc mercenary covered in thorn wounds.
The planks are arranged with military precision, each edge flush against the next, the towel centered with geometric exactness.
Not breaks. Snaps. Like a rubber band pulled past its limit. Like the moment bread dough tears because you've kneaded it one second too long and the gluten just surrenders.
"That," I say, pointing at the pallet, "is the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life."
"It meets structural requirements for..."
I stomp on the nearest plank.
It cracks clean down the middle. The sound is sharp and satisfying, a gunshot of splintering mahogany that echoes off the tiny room's walls. Dash's mouth opens. No sound comes out. His gold-ringed eyes track downward to the broken wood, then back up to my face.
I stomp again. A second plank splits.
"Magnolia."
Stomp. Third plank. My heel drives through the polished wood and the grain splinters outward in a starburst. Something feral and electric is pouring through my veins and I cannot stop.
I kick the towel aside. Drive my foot into the fourth plank.
Fifth. The wood skids across the floor, crashes into the wall.
"That was load-bearing," he says, very quietly.
"You are not sleeping on a pile of furniture scraps." Kick. Crack. "Like some kind of." Kick. "Discount." Crack. "Floor goblin."
The last plank skitters under the radiator. The floor is clear. Sawdust and splinters and the sad little towel in a heap. My heel throbs. My vintage dress has wood shavings clinging to the hem.
Dash stands perfectly still. Arms at his sides. The destroyed tuxedo shirt hanging open. Green blood drying on his forearms. And on his face, an expression I have never seen on any man, human or otherwise.
Awe.
Pure, slack-jawed, weapon-down awe. Like I'm a siege engine he didn't see coming. Like I've breached a wall he didn't know he'd built.
I grab his suspenders.
Both fists. The elastic straps are thick, built for Orc shoulders, and they stretch taut as I pull. He outweighs me by at least two hundred pounds. My shoes slide on the hardwood. My arms burn. I plant my feet and haul.
He doesn't budge.
"Move," I say through my teeth.
"Where."
"Bed."
Something detonates behind his eyes. The gold flares. His throat works. But he doesn't move, and I understand suddenly that this is the contract, his code, his ironclad mercenary discipline holding him in place like rebar through concrete.
So I cheat.
I twist the suspenders around my wrists for leverage, set my back foot against the bed frame, and pull.
Not because I'm strong enough to move him.
Because the gesture itself is the message.
Because I need him to understand that this is me choosing, me deciding, me tearing apart his stupid noble honor pallet and demanding he stop sleeping on the goddamn floor.
His boots shift. One inch. Two.
"This violates protocol," he rasps.
"Write me a citation."
His knees hit the mattress edge. The bed frame groans in protest, a sound of genuine structural alarm.
I release one suspender and shove him. My palm meets a wall of muscle that doesn't give at all, but he lets the momentum carry him, his weight collapsing backward onto the tiny mattress with the finality of an uprooted tree.
The bed screams.
Every spring compresses at once. The headboard cracks against the wall. The frame bows. He fills the mattress corner to corner and beyond. His feet hang off the end by a solid eight inches. His shoulders span the full width. There is technically no remaining bed. There is only Dash.
I stand over him, breathing hard, suspender elastic marks burned into my palms.
He stares up at me from the pillow. Hair wild against the white cotton. Shirt destroyed. Thorns still bristling from his skin. The green blood has smeared across the sheets and he looks like a battlefield someone planted flowers in.
"The bed is for you," he says. Hoarse. Wrecked. "The contract specifies your comfort takes..."
"Scoot over."
"There is nowhere to scoot."
"Then make room."
The springs whimper beneath him. That hairline fracture in his stoicism splits wider and something raw and hungry pours through.
He shifts three inches to the left.
The bed frame pops a bolt. It clatters across the floor like a spent bullet casing.
I climb in anyway.