Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Aldar
I’ve called Lucy Rodriguez twelve times.
Twelve calls, twenty texts, and I’ve checked every social media platform she uses.
There’s nothing on her social media since yesterday afternoon when she posted a photo of her gray cat sitting on a stack of Library of Congress documents with the caption: My research assistant is very serious about his work.
I replied with a single thumbs-up emoji because I’m not the kind of orc who sends multiple emojis or exclamation points. That’s Jonus’s department.
But right now, I’m pacing my hotel room in Washington DC at ten o’clock at night, concerned about her whereabouts.
Luce was supposed to be at the media event tonight. She confirmed this morning. She was excited. “I need to see if you’re as intense in real life as you are over text,” she’d joked.
I spent eleven minutes deciding between two shirts, which is ten minutes and fifty seconds longer than I normally spend on clothing decisions.
I chose the darker one because she once mentioned in a text that she liked dark colors on orcs, a detail I filed away and am now irritated at myself for remembering.
And yet she didn’t show.
She’s not answering her phone and not reading my texts. Her social media has been silent for over twenty-four hours.
I left the event without saying goodbye to anyone because I couldn’t stand in a room full of celebrating humans while her phone rang and rang and rang.
I should be analyzing this logically. There are dozens of explanations.
Dead phone battery. A Metro delay. She fell asleep.
She got caught up at work — Lucy loses track of time in the Library of Congress stacks the way other people lose track of time on their phones.
She’s told me this about herself and I found it charming, which should have been my first warning sign.
But my tactical mind keeps running scenarios I don’t want to think about.
The human criminal, Larry Aldridge, is arrested but his network isn’t fully dismantled.
Lucy helped Sloane with the research. She pulled Library of Congress records, chased down financial documents, dug through corporate filings.
Her name is probably in files that were seized from Sloane’s Georgetown apartment.
Lucy is connected to the investigation that just put a billionaire in prison. And she lives alone.
I pace. The hotel room is too small for an orc.
My horns don’t scrape the ceiling but it’s close.
The bedspread is too soft. The lighting is wrong.
Everything about this city is wrong and I want to go home to Truckee except that Truckee doesn’t have Lucy in it, which is apparently a factor I now weigh when evaluating locations.
When did that happen?
I know exactly when it happened. Sloane was kidnapped in Colombia and Jonus was tearing apart the world to find her.
A woman called the house asking for information about her best friend.
I answered because Jonus was on a satellite phone with his ex-SEALs and someone needed to give this woman an update before she called the FBI herself, which she was fully prepared to do.
“Is Sloane alive?” Lucy had asked me. Her voice was steady but I could hear the fear underneath. “Tell me the truth. I can handle it.”
I told her the truth. I told her we were organizing a rescue and that Jonus was coordinating everything and that he would bring Sloane home.
“Thank you,” she’d said. “I needed someone to give me a straight answer. Everyone else keeps telling me to stay calm and let the professionals handle it, but no one will actually tell me what’s happening.”
That was supposed to be the end of it. One phone call. Professional courtesy.
Instead, I called her the next day with an update. Then she texted me. I texted back. Then she sent me a picture of her cat, a gray cat named Whiskers who apparently rules her one-bedroom apartment near Capitol Hill with an iron paw.
I sent her a status update on Sloane’s recovery.
She sent me a review of a book she’d just finished.
I sent her an analysis of a security vulnerability I’d found in the Library of Congress digital archives, which she found genuinely interesting, which is the moment I realized I was in trouble because no woman has ever found my security analyses interesting.
We’ve talked every day since. Multiple times a day.
I know her schedule. I know she’s an early riser and she takes her coffee black, which I respect.
She reads two books a week and has strong opinions about library classification systems. Her cat sleeps on her pillow and she lets him even though she complains about the fur.
I call this familiarity. Professional rapport. I’ve been telling myself this for weeks. I’m running out of synonyms.
I can’t sit here anymore.
I grab my jacket. Keys. Tablet. I know her address because she texted it to me weeks ago so I could “check the security of her building.” We both knew this was an excuse. Neither of us said so.
I’ll go there and make sure she’s safe. She’ll open the door in pajamas with the cat in her arms and we’ll laugh about how her phone died and she fell asleep reading and I overreacted.
That’s the rational scenario. I’m choosing to believe it.
I reach for the door handle.
A knock stops me.
Not a tentative knock. Not a polite hotel-staff knock. A rapid, urgent rapping from someone standing right outside.
I open the door.
Lucy Rodriguez is in the hallway.
She’s shorter than I expected. I’ve only ever seen her on screens and in the photos she sends, always from the shoulders up, always smiling, always with that dark hair falling around her face. In person she barely reaches the middle of my chest.
She’s not smiling now.
Her dark hair is messy, pulled back in a lopsided ponytail. She’s wearing a sweater that’s inside out. I can see the seam running along the outside of her shoulder. Her jeans are wrinkled. Her shoes don’t match her outfit or each other. No makeup. She looks like she left her apartment running.
In her right hand is a cat carrier. Inside, a gray cat presses against the mesh window and meows at me.
“Luce.” My voice comes out rougher than I intend. “What happened? Are you—”
“Someone broke into my apartment.” She’s shaking.
Her voice is steady but her hands aren’t and the cat carrier trembles with each breath she takes.
“They trashed everything. My research files for Sloane’s article — the ones I pulled from the Library of Congress archives — they took all of them.
My computer is smashed. And there was a note on my kitchen counter. ”
“What did the note say?”
“It said I was next.”
The cat meows again, louder. As if confirming the urgency.
“I didn’t know where else to go.” Her voice drops to a whisper and something in it cracks. “I grabbed Whiskers and I came straight here. I know it’s late and I know we’ve never actually met in person before and this is insane but you were...” She swallows. “You were the first person I thought of.”
Not Sloane, who is two floors up in this same hotel. Not the police. Not her coworkers or her family.
Me.
I should say something reassuring. Something tactical. I should take the carrier, secure the room, check the hallway for anyone who might have followed her, call Kelt, alert Jonus, start working the problem the way I always do — calm, efficient, analytical.
Instead I reach for her arm and pull her inside.
My hand closes around her forearm to steady her, to get her out of the exposed hallway. She stumbles across the threshold and I catch her with my other hand on her shoulder. The cat carrier bumps against my leg. I take it from her and set it on the floor.
“You’re safe,” I tell her. “No one is going to hurt you. I’m going to—”
And then it hits me.
Her scent.
It doesn’t hit the way scents normally register. Humans smell pleasant enough to orcs — neutral, unremarkable, background noise. I’ve been around humans my whole life and they all smell more or less the same to me. Faint and forgettable.
This is not that.
This is a scent that goes straight into my blood. Into my bones. It’s warm and complex and it fills my lungs like I’ve been breathing wrong my entire life.
My body responds to it, for the first time, ever.
I go completely still. My hand tightens on her arm. My nostrils flare, drawing in more of her, and each breath makes it worse. Or better. I can’t tell the difference anymore.
I know what this is.
I sat in a chair in Garlen’s basement for months and watched my cousin howl and strain against chains because of this exact thing.
I read Kelt’s briefings about what happened to Keric in Maine.
Three days ago, I watched Jonus transform into something ancient and terrifying and crash through a second-story window with Sloane over his shoulder.
I’ve been telling myself for months that my interest in Lucy Rodriguez is professional courtesy.
I’ve been lying to myself with increasingly creative vocabulary.
My body has been waiting thirty-three years for this specific female.
She’s been on my phone, in my texts, in my thoughts for weeks now and I told myself it was nothing.
But my body was waiting until she was close enough to scent.
And now she’s standing in my hotel room with a cat carrier and tears in her eyes and my cock is stiffening for the first time in my life and I am absolutely certain that everything is about to change.
“Aldar?” Lucy is looking up at me, confused by my sudden stillness. Her brown eyes search my face. “Are you okay?”
Lucy Rodriguez is standing in my hotel room with a cat carrier and terror in her eyes and all I can think is that she smells like the rest of my life.
And I am in so much trouble.