12. Dash
DASH
The cooler door thumps shut behind me.
Blue light. Cold air. Her.
Magnolia stands between the berry flats and a stack of frozen butter crates, flour dusted across her collarbone, chocolate smeared along the curve of her neck, from three hours of relentless work. Her lips are parted. Her cheeks are flushed crimson beneath all that white powder.
My contract parameters are written on a blood-stained napkin in my vest pocket. Paragraph one, line three: Maintain professional distance at all times unless physical contact is necessary for the illusion.
The napkin can burn.
I close the distance in one stride. My hands find her waist and I lift her straight off the ground, pin her spine against the cold steel wall between the shelving units. A flat of raspberries wobbles.
"Dash." My name comes out of her in a cloud of white breath. The cold makes everything visible. Every exhale. Every gasp.
"Tell me to stop."
Her fingers curl into the buttercream-stained front of my shirt and pull. A button pings off a crate of frozen lemons.
Not stopping, then.
I crush my mouth against hers. She tastes like vanilla frosting and the espresso she drank two hours ago, bitter and sweet at the same time, and her tongue meets mine with the same ferocity she brought to that kitchen.
No hesitation. No delicacy. She kisses like she bakes.
Precise, aggressive, and completely unwilling to accept anything less than perfection.
My tusk catches her lower lip. She hisses. I pull back an inch.
"Don't you dare," she breathes, and drags me back in.
The cold bites into my overheated skin, steam rising off my forearms where the oven heat hasn't dissipated.
Her back presses flat against the freezing steel and she arches away from it, straight into my chest. The size difference is absurd.
My hands span her entire ribcage. Her feet dangle fourteen inches off the ground.
She wraps her legs around my waist and locks her ankles behind me and suddenly the geometry works, her hips flush against my stomach, her hands gripping my shoulders, her mouth hot and demanding against my jaw.
I break.
Three decades of mercenary discipline. A perfect record. An unbroken code of professional conduct. Gone. Obliterated by a five-foot-four baker with frosting in her hair.
My hand slides up her thigh, pushing flour-dusted fabric with it. Her skin is scalding against my cold palm. She shivers, and it has nothing to do with the temperature.
"You're freezing," I manage against her throat.
"I'm really not."
Her fingers rake down my chest, grabbing the collar of my undershirt.
The ruined fabric tears open. Cold air hits the scars across my torso and every nerve ending fires at once.
Her palms press flat against my bare skin and her breath catches at the heat of me, always running hot, Orcish blood like a furnace even in a walk-in cooler.
She traces a scar that runs from my collarbone to my sternum. Old. Deep. Her fingertip follows its jagged path, and something in my chest cracks open wider than the wound ever did.
I press my forehead against hers. Our breath mingles in thick white clouds between us.
"This violates the contract."
"You wrote the contract on a napkin."
"Napkin contracts are legally binding in seven territories."
"Sue me."
Her mouth finds the space below my ear. Teeth. I grunt, and my hips pin her harder against the wall. A shelf bracket groans under the pressure. A crate of frozen blueberries slides sideways and crashes to the floor, scattering berries like dark marbles across the concrete.
My hand tangles in her hair, flour puffing out in a white cloud. I tilt her head back. Expose the long line of her throat. The chocolate smear sits right above her pulse point and I drag my tongue across it, tasting cocoa and salt and skin.
Her legs tighten around me.
"Dash."
Not a question this time. A command.
I obey.
The cold steel wall fogs where her body heat meets it.
Her nails score lines down my back that I will feel for days.
Weeks. Every movement is urgent and graceless and absolutely correct, the way things are when they stop being performances and start being real.
She buries her face against my neck and makes sounds that the thick cooler walls swallow whole, sounds that belong to me now, that I will carry in my chest like contraband.
I brace one hand on the ceiling to keep from putting my full weight against her. Frost melts under my palm. My other arm wraps beneath her, holding her up, holding her close, holding her like the most important thing I have ever been contracted to protect.
Because she is.
She says my name one more time. Quiet. Almost lost in the hum of the cooling unit.
After, we stay pressed together. Her forehead against my collarbone. My back heaving. Frozen berries crushed beneath my boots. The blue light turns everything silver and strange and holy.
Her fingers trace my broken tusk.
"Your contract success rate just dropped to ninety-nine percent."
A sound comes out of me that I don't recognize.
Laughter.
We stand in the wreckage of the cooler like two soldiers after a skirmish. Crushed blueberries smeared across the concrete. A toppled crate of butter blocks. Raspberries scattered in a wide arc from the shelf I knocked sideways with my elbow at some point during the proceedings.
Magnolia slides down from the wall. Her legs buckle, and I catch her by the hips before her knees hit the floor.
"Steady."
"My legs are numb. The wall is literally below freezing."
"I was trying to provide adequate insulation."
She looks up at me. Flour in her eyebrows. Chocolate on her neck. Buttercream in a long streak across her left cheek like war paint. Her hair has abandoned all architectural ambition and hangs in wild tangles around her face. One of her earrings is missing.
She is the most devastating thing I have ever seen, and I have seen a Dire Wyrm crack open a mountain.
A laugh punches out of her. Loud and sudden and echoing off the steel walls. She claps both hands over her mouth, but it tears through her fingers anyway, shaking her whole body.
"Your shirt."
I look down. The torn fabric hangs from my shoulders like broken flags. Buttercream fingerprints mark a path from my collar to my belt line in a pattern that tells a very specific and very incriminating story.
"I have a spare in the room."
"You have flour." She gestures vaguely at my entire torso. "Everywhere. You look like a green powdered donut."
"I don't know what that is."
"It's a compliment. Trust me."
She staggers to the industrial towel dispenser mounted by the door and yanks out a fistful of coarse white kitchen towels. She runs three of them under the emergency hand wash station, wrings them out, and throws a wet towel directly at my face.
It lands with a cold slap across my nose.
I peel it off. She is already laughing again, doubled over, one hand braced on a shelf of cream cheese blocks.
"Your face. Oh my god, your face."
"My face is my face."
"You caught a griffin with your bare hands and you just stood there and let a wet towel hit you square in the nose."
"The towel was not a threat."
"The towel destroyed you."
She is wrong. The towel did not destroy me.
She destroyed me. Approximately seven minutes ago, against a wall of frozen berries. Completely. Irreversibly.
I drag the towel across my chest, scrubbing at the flour and buttercream. The cold water raises every scar into sharp relief against my skin. Magnolia stops laughing long enough to watch, and the heat in her eyes makes the cooler feel tropical.
"Turn around."
"Why."
"Because you have a handprint on your back. My handprint. In chocolate. And if anyone sees it, your mercenary reputation is finished."
I turn. The wet towel presses between my shoulder blades and she scrubs with the vicious efficiency she brings to cleaning her baking pans. Firm, circular, thorough. She has to stand on her toes to reach the top of my shoulders.
"Hold still. You're swaying."
"You are pushing me."
"You weigh four hundred pounds. I'm not pushing you anywhere."
"Three-eighty."
"Oh, excuse me. My mistake. Totally reasonable."
She scrubs harder. The towel catches on a ridge of scar tissue and she softens immediately, tracing around it with careful pressure, and that small mercy does something to my sternum that no battlefield medic could diagnose.
I take a fresh towel and turn back to face her. Wet the cloth under the tap. Lift her chin with one knuckle.
"Hold still."
She goes quiet.
I wipe the chocolate from her throat in slow, careful strokes.
Clean the flour from her cheekbones. Brush a smear of vanilla frosting from the shell of her ear.
Her brown eyes track my face the entire time, wide and soft and steady.
No flinching. No looking away from the scars.
From the parts of me that make humans cross to the other side of the street.
She just stands there and lets me clean frosting off her ear like it is the most ordinary thing in the world.
Something unfamiliar settles into my chest.
Not the sharp readiness of a contract. Not the heavy alertness of a patrol. Not the flat numbness of camp between missions. Something warm and low and even, like coals banked in a fireplace after everyone has gone to bed. Steady heat. No urgency. No vigilance.
Peace.
I have been a mercenary for twenty-nine years. I have guarded caravans through the Ashveil Pass. I have held a bridge alone against fourteen armed men. I have slept in ditches and eaten cold rations and broken my tusk on a siege tower gate.
I have never known this.
I wipe a last streak of flour from her collarbone. Her pulse thumps against my fingertip. Slow and trusting.
She grabs a fresh towel and stretches up to scrub my jaw. Her tongue pokes out in concentration. I dip my chin to give her better access.
"You missed a spot," she says.
"Where."
She presses her lips to the corner of my mouth. Quick. Warm. Gone.
"There."