Chapter 13
JUNIA
The door shakes on its hinges.
Not a knock. Not a polite three-rap request for entry. The entire doorframe rattles, wood groaning against the deadbolt, and for one terrible second I think the animated flamingos have come back for revenge.
I'm sitting on the kitchen floor. Surrounded by broken terracotta.
The orchid I hurled at the wall an hour ago drips soil down the baseboard in a slow brown river.
My eyes are swollen. My nose is running.
I've eaten four spoonfuls of peanut butter straight from the jar because the grocery store felt like a bridge too far for a woman whose heart just got used as a doormat by a seven-foot lawn fascist.
The door shakes again.
"Junia."
"Go away, Flynn."
"I can't."
"You absolutely can. It's a simple mechanical process. You rotate your body one hundred and eighty degrees and engage your leg muscles in a forward direction. I believe the technical term is walking."
Silence. Heavy breathing. Then, quieter:
"I was wrong."
The peanut butter spoon stops halfway to my mouth.
"About the rosebush. About the fertilizer. About everything I said to you." A long pause. Something hits the door with a dull thud. His forehead, maybe. "It wasn't you. It was never you."
I set the jar down. Wipe my hands on my overalls. The knees of them are still stained from yesterday, from the trenches we dug together, from the loam we packed with our bare hands shoulder to shoulder. The soil under my fingernails is his soil. Mine. Ours.
He accused me of destroying his rosebush.
Not in a calm, let's-discuss-this way. In a roaring, vein-popping, finger-pointing way that made the windows vibrate.
And the worst part wasn't the volume. The worst part was his eyes.
The way they shuttered closed. The way he looked at me and saw chaos instead of a person.
Instead of the woman who fell asleep against him and traced his shoulder with her fingertip until he rumbled like a diesel engine.
"Junia. Please open the door. I have proof."
"Proof of what?"
"Proof that I'm an idiot."
I stare at the door from the kitchen floor. The deadbolt is a cheap brass thing, probably wouldn't survive another impact from those massive green fists. But he isn't hitting it anymore. He's just standing there. Breathing.
I get up. Terracotta crunches under my boots. I cross the living room, step over a toppled fern, and press my eye to the peephole.
Flynn Danger fills the entire fish-eye lens. Moss-green skin flushed dark at the cheekbones. His tee shirt torn at the collar, drywall dust on his knuckles, blood on two of them. He's holding a laptop with both hands like a priest holds a hymnal. The screen faces outward.
I open the door three inches. Chain still on.
"Talk."
He holds the laptop higher. The screen shows grayscale security footage. Timestamp reads 0312.
"Watch."
A figure crosses his lawn. Tall, lean, moving like a cat on a marble floor. Dark overcoat. Pointed ears catching the infrared light.
Valerius.
The elven HOA president stops at Flynn's rosebush and pulls something from inside his coat.
A shovel that glows blue with enchantment.
He drives the blade into the soil. The handle writhes and pulses.
The root system surrenders in seconds, cut clean by magic that no organic fertilizer could ever replicate.
Valerius rips the bush free. Stomps the root ball. Kicks the halves apart like garbage. Brushes his gloves. Walks away.
Ninety seconds. Start to finish.
The footage loops.
My hand grips the door edge so hard the wood bites into my palm.
"I found boot prints," Flynn says. "Dress shoes.
Smooth soles. Silverleaf pollen in the grass.
The damage pattern was directional. Upward.
Not radial. Not an explosion. Not fertilizer.
" His jaw works. The laptop trembles in his grip.
"I should have looked before I opened my mouth.
I should have tracked it first. I know how to track.
It's the one thing I'm supposed to be good at, and instead I stood in my yard and screamed at the only person who—"
He breaks. Just. Snaps. Like a green branch twisted past its tolerance.
He stares at the three-inch gap between us. The laptop lowers to his side. His bloody knuckles hang loose.
"You made me feel alive. You told me that mattered. And the first time something went wrong, I turned you into the enemy because enemies are easier than—"
He stops. Swallows. The muscles in his throat work like rope under tension.
"Than what?"
"Than admitting I need someone."
The chain rattles. My fingers are on it. The brass is warm from the door's absorbed heat, and it slides free of the track with a single soft click.
I open the door all the way.
Flynn stands outside, seven feet of rigid, rule-obsessed, lawn-worshipping orc, and his eyes are wet.
I reach for the front of his ruined shirt and pull him inside.
He stumbles through the doorway. Not because I'm strong enough to move him.
Because he lets me. Six hundred pounds of orc muscle choosing to be pulled by a five-foot-six woman in peanut butter-stained overalls, and somehow that act of surrender hits harder than anything he's ever done with his fists.
The laptop clatters onto my coffee table. His boot catches the toppled fern. Soil scatters across the rug. He flinches, already bending to clean it up.
"Leave it."
He freezes mid-crouch. His eyes come up to mine. Green irises ringed with copper, bloodshot, wide.
I crouch down to his level. The bruised knuckles hang between his knees. Two of them are split clean, dried blood crusted dark against the moss of his skin. He punched something. A wall, judging by the drywall dust. His own wall. In his own perfect house.
"Show me your hands."
He doesn't move.
"Flynn."
He extends them. Palms up. They're enormous.
Each one could wrap around my entire ribcage with room to spare.
The calluses are thick from shovels and shears and axe handles, a topography of labor I've memorized with my fingertips.
And there, across the first and second knuckles of his right hand, twin gashes weeping fresh red.
I pull a bandana from my pocket. Bright yellow. Sunflower print. I wrap it around his knuckles without asking permission and tie it tight.
"Ow."
"Good."
His breath stutters. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob. The sound lands somewhere between the two and dies in him.
"I don't forgive easily," I say. "I grew up with three older brothers who broke everything I ever grew. Every seedling, every window box. They'd tell me it was my fault for putting something fragile in a place where a football could reach it. And I believed them for a long time."
His jaw tightens.
"What you said this morning sounded exactly like that."
"Junia—"
"I'm not done." I tighten the bandana. He hisses. "You stood in your yard and told me my chaos finally ruined something worth keeping. And it hit me right here." I press my fist against my own sternum. "Because for about six hours I actually believed we'd built something worth keeping too."
His whole body contracts. Shoulders curling inward. Chin dropping. This massive, battle-scarred orc folding himself small in my living room like he's trying to disappear into the floorboards.
"But you came back." I hold up one finger. "With evidence." A second finger. "And an admission that you were wrong." A third. "And you bled on your own walls instead of doubling down."
The copper-ringed eyes lift.
"My brothers never once came back."
I reach up and press my palm flat against his cheek. The skin is hot. Rough along the jawline where the tusk roots push through. His breath catches and holds, ribs locked, everything locked, like a man standing at something and waiting to find out if the ground will hold.
"I forgive you. But if you ever use that voice on me again, I will plant poison ivy in your underwear drawer and water it daily."
A sound rips out of him. Low and broken and genuine. A laugh. The first real one I've heard from him in twelve hours, and it transforms his whole face. The rigid lines crack open. The jaw unclenches. He looks five years younger and ten pounds lighter.
He covers my hand with his bandaged one. Sunflowers against green skin.
"I won't."
"Good." I drop my hand and stand. Pace to the window. The sun is mid-sky. Through the glass, his yard is visible. The crater where the rosebush lived gapes like a wound in the otherwise flawless green.
"The judging is tomorrow morning."
Flynn's head snaps up. Battle mode. The shift is instant. One second, devastated penitent. The next, six-foot-seven of tactical calculation scanning the room like it contains a field map.
"Nine a.m. sharp. Valerius submitted the schedule to the committee last week."
"Which means he ripped your rosebush out the night before prep day. On purpose. So you'd spend today mourning instead of finishing the archway."
Flynn rises from the crouch. Slowly. Vertebra by vertebra. His skull nearly brushes my ceiling fan.
"Where would he take it?"
"His greenhouse." Zero hesitation. "The one behind his property. Climate-controlled, ward-locked, sits on a half-acre lot that backs up to the ravine."
"You've been inside?"
"I've been past the perimeter. Twice. During my morning runs." His eyes narrow. "Third row of hedges, east side, has a gap where the irrigation pipe feeds through. Camera blind spot. I mapped it three weeks ago."
"You mapped his camera blind spots three weeks ago?"
"Threat assessment is a warband habit."
I stare at him. This ridiculous, meticulous, lawn-mowing, hedge-trimming, camera-mapping orc.
"We're breaking into an elf's greenhouse."
"We're retrieving stolen property."
"Under cover of darkness."
"Tactically optimal timeframe."
"Flynn." I grab his arm. The bicep barely fits inside both my hands. "This is insane."