BORIS #2
Her lower lip trembles again. She grabs both suspender straps, one in each fist, bandage and all, and pulls me back in.
We lie on the table for a long time. Not sleeping. The candles burn low, wax pooling in the iron holders, and the tavern settles around us with the quiet creaks and sighs of old wood cooling after a hot day.
Her head rests on me. My heartbeat has slowed to something manageable.
Her fingers trace idle patterns across my collarbone, and every few minutes she presses her nose against my shirt and inhales, like she's cataloging the scent profile.
Woodsmoke. Roasted spice. Sweat. Whatever combination of those things adds up to me.
"The cauliflower steak," she says.
"Mm."
"You scored the surface in a crosshatch before charring it."
"Deeper char penetration. Saw you do it with a butternut squash through your kitchen window last Tuesday."
Her finger stops tracing. "You've been watching me cook."
"You work in front of a window."
"That's not a denial."
"No. It isn't."
She props her chin on my sternum. The weight of her skull, slight as it is, presses the bone.
Her eyes are still bright in the dying candlelight, and a dark strand of hair sticks to the corner of her mouth.
I brush it away with my thumb. She catches the thumb between her teeth. Bites once. Releases.
"We're going to destroy that critic tomorrow."
"Bold."
"I mean it." She pushes up to sitting, straddling my waist, and the view from this angle belongs in a painting.
Her hair wild. Chef coat hanging open. Cheeks flushed.
She looks like someone who has just finished the best service of her life.
"Your fire spice, my technique. His palate won't know what hit it. "
I fold my arms behind my head. The table protests. "You want to run through the menu?"
"Right now?"
"You have somewhere else to be?"
She grins. Full. Unguarded. No trace of the rigid perfectionist who sprinted across the street to yell at me about smoke ventilation. This version of Solene Rostova sits on an Orc in a wrecked dining room surrounded by cast iron skillets on the floor and doesn't care about a single one of them.
This version is magnificent.
We spend the next hour talking through every course.
She slides off the table and finds a stub of chalk in the bar drawer, and we map the entire tasting menu on the slate board behind the taps.
Seven courses. Each one a collision of her precision and my fire.
Smoked beet carpaccio with charred pistachio dust. A black garlic and truffle consommé.
The cauliflower steak as the centerpiece, reconstructed with her plating sensibility and my searing technique.
She writes in sharp, angular letters. I draw crude pictures of the plates next to each entry. She doesn't complain about the drawings. Progress.
"Dessert," she says, tapping the chalk against the slate. "The chocolate cake."
"Already perfected."
"It needs acid. A blood orange reduction. Just a thread across the top."
"Blood orange."
"Trust me."
Two words. They land in my heart and sit there, warm and heavy. I pull a bottle of aged cider from the shelf behind the bar, uncork it with my teeth, and hand it to her. She drinks straight from the neck. Wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
I take the bottle. Drink. The cider is sharp and cold and fizzes against my tusks.
"We're going to win this," she says.
"We're going to bury him in flavor so deep he'll need a shovel to dig out."
She laughs. Actual laughter. The sound rolls off the stone walls and fills the empty tavern the way a hundred rowdy patrons never quite manage to. I store it somewhere safe.
We blow out the last candle. Lock the heavy oak door. The iron key turns with a grinding clunk, and the enchanted deadbolt glows blue for a moment before settling. The street is empty. Wet from the earlier storm. Puddles catch the moonlight and throw it back in silver coins.
She leans against my arm. Just for a second. Shoulder to bicep. Then she straightens, squares her jaw, and walks across the street to her own door with the kind of stride that says tomorrow belongs to her.
I wait until her light clicks on upstairs. Then I go to bed.
The town hall kitchen door hangs from one hinge.
The top hinge. The bottom is sheared clean off, screws ripped from the frame, and the heavy oak panel swings inward at a drunken angle. Splinters litter the stone steps. The lock mechanism lies six feet away in the decorative hedge, brass faceplate bent double.
Solene drops her knife roll.
I push past the broken door. The kitchen inside looks like a battlefield after the losing side has fled.
Our prep station, the long marble counter we spent two days scrubbing and seasoning, is cracked down the center.
Someone drove something heavy into it from above.
The stainless steel shelving unit behind it lies on its side, bowls and measuring cups scattered like shrapnel.
And the soot sprites.
Dozens of them. Each one no bigger than my fist, coal-black and smoldering, with pinprick orange eyes that blink in unison when we step through the doorway.
They swarm over our ingredient crates. One gnaws through a burlap sack of heritage grain flour, spewing white powder into the air.
Another sits inside an open jar of the Korathian fire salt, rolling in the crimson dust and giggling, a thin, crackling sound like burning newspaper.
Solene's hand closes around my wrist. Squeezes. Hard.
"Boris. Every single marrow squash is gone"