Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Sloane
I’m in the arms of a seven-foot-tall green orc, racing through the Colombian jungle in the middle of the night.
This is not how I expected my rescue to go.
Two black horns jut from his forehead, curving back over his skull.
Tusks rise from his bottom lip, gleaming white in the occasional shaft of moonlight.
His skin is actually green, not the olive undertone some humans have, but genuinely, truly green.
And his muscular arms are wrapped around me like I weigh nothing at all.
I’ve seen this face before, pixelated through bad wifi at two in the morning, frozen mid-laugh when the connection glitched, grainy and distant through a laptop screen. But seeing Jonus Irontree in person is something else entirely.
Everything about him is more.
He moves through terrain that nearly killed me like it’s a city sidewalk.
Roots and vines that tripped me, branches that whipped my face, undergrowth so dense I could barely push through, he navigates all of it without breaking stride.
He’s got a backpack, heavy weapons, and me in his arms, and he’s not even breathing hard.
“I can do this all day,” he’d told me earlier, with that mischievous smile. The same smile I’d seen through the screen a hundred times.
I knew orcs were strong. I wrote in my articles about their physical superiority, enhanced senses and their ability to see in the dark. But knowing something intellectually and experiencing it pressed against a massive green chest are two very different things.
I keep glancing up at his harsh orc features, to confirm he’s real. Yep, still real and carrying me through a Colombian jungle because I wrote his name on a form.
I was planning my escape from that pit, running through scenarios, carving footholds, prying at rotted boards. I’d accepted that no one was coming for me. That the only person who could save Sloane Adams was Sloane Adams.
And then I heard footsteps behind me in the jungle. My greatest fear realized, that someone had followed me. I hid against that tree with a rock in my fist, ready to fight and die swinging.
And then his voice cut through the darkness.
Part of me still doesn’t believe this is happening.
I’m waiting to wake up back in that pit, discover this was all a fever dream brought on by dehydration and desperation.
But his arms are solid around me. His heartbeat steady against my side.
The jungle smells real, the wet earth, rotting vegetation and the faint scent of gun oil from his weapons.
“You’re really here because I put you down as my emergency contact?” The question comes out before I can stop it. “That’s the reason?”
Jonus glances down at me, his stride never faltering. “Well, it’s the reason I was called first. The State Department contacted me when you missed your check-in.”
“And you just... came?”
“I made calls and assembled a team.” He adjusts his grip on me slightly, pulling me closer against his chest. “Your friend has been incredible, by the way. Lucy Rodriguez.”
My chest tightens. Lucy.
“She’s been coordinating with your editor, your family, keeping information flowing so I could focus on getting to you,” Jonus continues. “That woman is a force of nature. I’ve never seen anyone organize a crisis response quite like her.”
Warmth spreads across my chest. “She’s my best friend,” I say quietly. “Has been since college.”
“I know. She told me. She also told me that if I didn’t bring you back alive, she would find a way to make my life very unpleasant. I believed her.”
Despite everything, I almost smile. That sounds like Lucy.
“You didn’t have to come yourself,” I say. “You could have just... made calls. Hired people.”
A growl rumbles in his chest. “You were captured by the cartel. Gods only knew what they were doing to you. I still don’t know entirely what they’ve done to you while it took twelve fucking days to get you out of there. But I’m doing my best to get you somewhere safe for medical attention.”
He talks like there was never another option, like staying behind was simply not possible.
“They didn’t rape me,” I tell him. “Not that I didn’t think they never were going to go that route, but for whatever reason they hadn’t yet, maybe because they considered me a high value kidnap?
I don’t know why I lucked out that way. But they did, um—” I pause, remembering the beatings, especially when I first arrived, “do other things to me.”
He growls again and seems to move faster.
But I need to know one more thing. “Did anyone else...” I trail off, not sure how to ask. “I mean, did Ryan...” I can’t finish the question, but I need to know if my fiancé even tried.
“The State Department contacted him,” he answers carefully.
“And?”
“He declined involvement. Said the relationship was over.”
The words land like stones. “He declined involvement?” I sputter. “Like I was a business opportunity that didn’t pan out. Like a cartel kidnapping was simply too inconvenient for him to bother with.”
“He’s human,” Jonus says, like this explains everything.
I press against the chest of the orc who flew to a whole other country to pull me out of a pit. “He’s my former fiancé,” I say quietly.
“What?”
“It’s over between us. It was basically already over, I just hadn’t said the words outloud.
” I shift slightly in Jonus’s arms, looking up at the dark canopy passing overhead.
The small glimpse of starry sky. “We never actually had much in common. It would’ve been silly for us to marry.
” The truth of it lightens in my chest. “We were never in the same place,” I continue, more to myself than to Jonus.
“Literally or figuratively. He wanted a version of me that doesn’t exist. And I kept trying to convince myself that ‘fine’ was enough. ”
I glance up at Jonus. Is he... smiling?
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.” But the smile doesn’t fade.
We travel in silence for a while. The rhythm of his movement becomes familiar, the steady march, the way he adjusts his grip when the terrain shifts, the slight tensing of his arms when he navigates a tricky section. I find myself relaxing into it, trusting his body to carry us both.
“How bad are your feet?”
The question catches me off guard. Direct. No pretense. That’s Jonus — I remember that from our calls. He never danced around difficult topics. “They’re fine,” I say automatically. “I wrapped them in fabric from my shirt.”
“The fabric that fell off two kilometers ago?”
Damn. He noticed.
The truth is, my feet are destroyed. I know it.
I’ve been trying not to think about it, focusing on the surreal fact of being rescued instead of the very real pain shooting up my legs every time he shifts his grip.
The soles are shredded from twelve days barefoot in that pit and then running through the jungle.
I don’t even want to know what they look like, but admitting it feels like weakness. “I’ve had worse,” I try.
“Have you?”
“...No. But I’ll survive.”
“When we get to the helicopter, there’s a med kit. We’ll clean them, wrap them properly.”
“It can wait until we get back to—”
“It can’t.” His voice is firm. “Open wounds in this environment are dangerous. You need medical care as soon as we’re out of here.” He looks down at me, and there’s something in his dark eyes that brooks no argument. “That’s not negotiable, Sloane.”
Genuine concern wrapped in practical action. I like this orc so much. No one has worried about me like this in a long time. Maybe ever.
I don’t argue further.
Time blurs together after that. I drift in and out, exhaustion pulling at me despite my best efforts to stay alert.
Sometimes I wake to find the terrain has changed — dense jungle giving way to slightly clearer paths, then back to thick undergrowth.
The sky is slowly lightening through the canopy. Dawn is approaching.
“When we get to the extraction point, the rest of the team will join us,” Jonus says at some point, his voice pulling me back to full consciousness. “I don’t want you to be alarmed when you see the four other team members.”
“Who exactly came with you? Is it all orcs?”
“My cousins are here.” He navigates around a massive fallen tree as he talks. “Kelt is former military, he planned this whole operation. Aldar is the tech expert. He runs the drone, handles communications.”
I file the names away. Kelt. Aldar. More Irontrees.
“There are also two humans. Cole and Martinez. Former Navy SEALs. They’re professionals — they’ve done extractions like this before.”
“You hired two Navy SEALs?” The words come out slightly incredulous.
“I hired the best people I could find to get you out.” He says it simply, like hiring ex-special forces operators to rescue a journalist he’s never met in person is just what anyone would do.
“Jonus...”
“They’re good men. They came because the mission was right, not just for the money.” He glances down at me. “Everyone on this team volunteered to be here, Sloane. They all wanted to help.”
I don’t know what to say to that. So I change the subject.
“The story I was working on. Aldridge and the cartel connection…”
“What about it?”
“When they kidnapped me they also took my laptop.” I say, watching his expression.
“But they couldn’t take what I’d already learned.
I memorized everything before I left. The shell companies, the wire transfers, the real estate purchases.
It’s all still here.” I tap my temple. “But I also saved everything in the cloud so the hardware didn’t matter so much.
I was ready in case something happened.”
“Of course you were.”
There’s admiration in his voice. The same tone he used when he found me in the jungle and realized I’d escaped the pit on my own.
“When we get back,” I say, “I’m going to finish that story. That asshole hasn’t stopped me. Aldridge is still going down.”
He snorts. “I don’t doubt it for a second.”