Orc’d & Loaded

CHAPTER 1 SOLENE

SOLENE

The smoke hits me before I even open the front door of Verdure.

A wall of acrid, wood-heavy smoke that rolls across Rue des Martyrs like a fog bank with a grudge. My hand freezes on the brass handle. Through the glass, I see a plume of grey-black char billow from the building directly across the street, thick enough to cast a shadow on the sidewalk.

No.

I push through the door. The smell is worse out here. Primal. Aggressive. Like someone set an entire forest on fire and decided to season it.

My gaze snaps to the source.

The storefront across from mine, the one that sat vacant for eleven blessed, quiet months, now sports a hand-painted sign I haven't seen before. The letters are crude, blocky, painted in what appears to be actual blood-red pigment on a slab of rough-hewn wood:

BOROG'S. MEAT. FIRE.

Three words. No subtlety. No punctuation consistency. A thesis statement in barbarism.

And beneath that sign, on the sidewalk, on a Parisian morning where civilized people are buying croissants and reading Le Monde, a massive orc is tending to what can only be described as a bonfire.

A bonfire. Flames lick four feet into the air from a crude iron pit that has no business existing on a public sidewalk. Sparks spiral upward and drift across the street toward my ventilation system. Toward my restaurant. Toward the linen napkins I hand-pressed yesterday.

My chef coat is spotless. Starched this morning at 5 AM. Every button aligned. I haven't even started prep yet, and already this day is ruined.

I step off the curb.

A taxi blares its horn. I don't stop. The driver swerves, shouts something about my mother. I cut between a delivery van and a cyclist, my clogs slapping the cobblestones, coat flaring behind me like a cape. A Citroen brakes hard enough to squeal. I hold up one hand without looking and keep moving.

The heat reaches me six feet from the pit.

Heat. The kind that tightens skin and dries eyes.

The orc crouches beside it, his back to me, feeding a split log the diameter of my thigh into the flames with the casual ease of someone adding a sugar cube to tea.

His arms are bare, green-skinned, corded with muscle that shifts under the surface like tectonic plates.

A leather apron hangs from his neck, scarred and blackened across the front.

He hums. Low, rumbling, tuneless. The ground vibrates with it.

"Excuse me."

Nothing. The humming continues. He adjusts the log with his bare hand. His bare hand, directly in the fire, repositioning it like a throw pillow.

"Excuse me!"

The humming stops. His head turns. Slowly. The way a boulder might rotate if boulders had tusks.

Two tusks, specifically. They jut upward from a heavy jaw, yellowed and chipped at the tips.

His face is broad, flat-nosed, dominated by deep-set eyes.

A thick scar bisects his left brow and disappears into a mane of black hair pulled into a topknot with what looks like butcher's twine. He blinks at me once.

"You are small chef from across street."

"I am the owner of the restaurant across the street, and you need to put this out. Now." I gesture at the inferno between us. A spark lands on my sleeve. I swat it dead before it can leave a mark.

He stands.

My neck cranes. Up, and then further up. He is not just massive. He is as big as a commercial refrigerator wearing an apron. My head reaches somewhere around his sternum, and his sternum is a shelf I could set a cutting board on.

"Is seasoning fire." He says this like it explains everything. His thick fingers wave dismissively. "Needs two more hours."

"Two more hours? You're shooting embers onto a public street. You're smoking out my dining room. You don't have a permit for open flame, you can't possibly have a permit for open flame, this is the ninth arrondissement, not a campground."

He scratches the base of one tusk with a blackened thumbnail. His brow furrows, which rearranges his entire face into something that resembles a rockslide in progress.

"Fire has been burning since four in morning. You are only one complaining."

"Because everyone else is too afraid to cross the street!"

His mouth twitches. The corner pulls up around the right tusk. Not quite a smile. More like the expression a cat makes before it knocks a glass off a table.

"Small chef is not afraid."

"Small chef is furious. There's a difference."

He looks down at me. I look up at him. The fire crackles and pops between us. Somewhere on Rue des Martyrs, the taxi driver is still honking.

The orc reaches into the pit and pulls out a chunk of smoldering wood, holding it in his palm like an apple. Smoke curls from between his fingers.

"You want to smell?"

I do not want to smell.

I want to call the fire brigade, the health inspector, and possibly the military. What I do instead is lean back, because the chunk of smoldering applewood he extends toward my face radiates enough heat to curl the baby hairs at my temples.

"Put that away."

He shrugs. One-shouldered. The gesture moves more mass than I carry on my entire frame. The wood chunk goes back into the pit with a shower of sparks that dance across the morning air like malicious fireflies.

"Suit yourself, small chef."

"Stop calling me that."

But he's already turning away, ducking through the doorway of his establishment with the practiced hunch of someone who has never once encountered architecture built to his specifications. The doorframe groans as his shoulder clips it. He doesn't notice. Or doesn't care. Probably both.

I follow him.

I don't know why I follow him. My prep list is seventeen items long, my sous chef is late again, and I have two cases of high-end micro greens arriving in forty minutes that need to be inspected leaf by individual leaf.

Instead, I step through the doorway of Borog's.

Meat. Fire. and into what can only be described as a culinary war zone.

The interior is raw. Unfinished. Exposed brick, exposed beams, exposed everything.

Three massive wooden tables run the length of the room, rough-cut and scarred, the kind of furniture you'd build with an axe rather than a saw.

Iron hooks line the far wall, and from them hang carcasses.

Whole ones. A pig, split down the center.

Something with horns, it might be a large goat.

In the midst of it all, a second fire pit. Indoors. An open, stone-lined fire pit built directly into the floor, vented by a chimney that appears to have been punched through the ceiling with brute force rather than engineered. Rebar pokes from the edges of the hole.

The air is thick. Smoke and rendered fat and something herbal, something I can't quite place.

My lungs protest. My brain, the traitorous part that has spent two decades training itself to deconstruct flavor profiles, catalogs it automatically.

Juniper. Black pepper. Some kind of wild thyme variety I've never encountered.

It smells incredible.

Boris Cleaver stands at the indoor pit. Because of course there are two pits. Of course this operation requires two separate fires. He grips a heavy iron pitchfork, a real one, not a kitchen tool but an actual agricultural implement with four tines, and jams it into a gigantic slab of meat.

The slab sizzles. Fat renders in rivulets that hiss and pop in the coals. He flips it with one arm. One arm. It would require my entire line to lift, and he rotates it like a crêpe. The underside is lacquered with a bark so dark and glistening it looks like volcanic glass. It's beautiful.

"You!" I snap. "We need to talk about the smoke situation."

He turns. And his face does something I am not prepared for.

It splits open.

Not violently. Joyfully. The broadest, most unguarded grin I have ever seen stretches across that massive green face, rearranging the scar tissue, pushing the tusks apart, crinkling the corners of those wet-clay eyes into deep folds.

His entire body orients toward me with the enthusiasm of a Labrador spotting its owner after a ten-minute absence.

"NEIGHBOR!"

The word hits me like a physical force. The walls vibrate. A hook on the far wall rattles, and the goat-pony carcass swings gently.

"You come to Borog's! This is good! This is VERY good!"

He is already moving. The pitchfork gets planted in the dirt floor like a flag, and his free hand seizes a cleaver from the table beside him.

Not a chef's knife. A cleaver the length of my forearm.

He brings it down on the slab in one stroke, severing a rib section with surgical precision that momentarily short-circuits my fury.

The cut is perfect. Clean through the bone.

"Here. You try."

He thrusts the rib toward me. Juice runs down his wrist in dark, shining streams, dripping onto the floor between us. Steam rises from the exposed meat in a slow curl.

"I am vegan."

His face freezes.

The grin doesn't disappear so much as it locks in place, like a clock that's stopped. The rib hovers between us. A drop of rendered fat falls from it and lands on the toe of my left clog.

"You are... what?"

"Vegan. I don't eat meat. I don't eat animal products. I run a plant-based fine dining restaurant directly across the street from this..." I search for the word. "...situation."

He looks at the rib. Looks at me. Looks at the rib again. His brow furrows into that rockslide configuration.

"But this is beef."

"Yes. I can see that."

"From very happy cow."

"The cow's emotional state is not the issue.

The issue is that your outdoor fire is pumping smoke directly into my ventilation system, your sparks are threatening my dining room, and I have a reservation for twelve on Thursday that I will NOT lose because my hundred-euro tasting menu tastes like a campfire. "

He takes a bite of the rib himself. A massive, wet, crunching bite. Chews with his mouth open.

"You want to try just a little piece?"

My hand moves before my brain approves the action.