16. Brakkus
Brakkus
I’d shifted back to my orc form after the bath. When I walked into the kitchen, Hannah handed me a glass of iced tea like the seven-foot warrior in front of her and the man from the bathtub were the same person.
We stood at the kitchen island, not talking, which was its own kind of magic. Her hair was still damp, drying in waves against her neck. Out the windows the hills shimmered in the Texas morning heat.
“What time did Lola say they’d be back?” Hannah asked.
“Before lunch.”
“Good.” She took a sip of her tea. “He needs to eat before his nap or the whole afternoon goes sideways.”
I leaned against the counter and let the sound of her wash over me. Her scent was all through my house now. In my bedroom. On my skin. And I wanted it to stay there. My phone buzzed on the counter. Gate notification, Lola’s sedan. She’d be here in minutes.
There was a confession sitting in my chest last night by the pool.
I was going to tell her she was my mate before her father’s phone call interrupted.
It wasn’t something I could hold back anymore.
Not after making love to her in the bath.
Not after tasting her sweet pussy. There was no more denying it.
“Hannah.”
She looked up. “Hmm?”
“There’s something I want to tell you.”
“Okay.” She set down her glass and gave me her whole attention. “Tell me.”
“It’s about what I said the other night. About orcs sometimes having?—”
The front door opened.
“We’re home!” Lola called, sounding strangely formal. “Mr. Drakkar? You have visitors.”
Heels clicked across the hardwood.
I caught the scent and knew before they rounded the corner into the living room. The words I’d been about to say went down my throat like a stone.
Theron and Orsala Vossic stood in the entry to the kitchen.
They’d come in their human forms. Theron tall and silver, in summer-weight wool despite the hundred degrees outside. Orsala in cream linen and pearls, not a hair out of place after a cross-country flight. Lean, polished, aristocratic. Neither of them was sweating. Old money doesn’t sweat.
Lola stood off to one side with Otto on her hip and the diaper bag over her shoulder. Her eyes found mine with an apology in them.
“Brakkus,” Theron said.
“Theron.” I nodded. “Orsala. This is unexpected.”
“You did invite us to come see Otto for ourselves,” Orsala said.
I had said that. I’d said it the way you dare somebody to jump off the roof, certain they never would. We’ll see, she’d told me, and I’d hung up feeling like I’d won the round. I’d been too busy investigating the wrong person to remember.
“You should have called,” I said.
“We did,” Orsala said. “For months.”
Under her perfume there was the scent of orc, a scent that hit me below the ribs. Mothers and daughters share a scent the way they share a laugh. For half a second, Nadia was standing in my kitchen. Then it was just her mother again, looking up at me with Otto’s amber eyes.
Theron moved into the living room without a word, the way a man tours a property he’s thinking about buying.
Orsala followed, settling into the cowhide armchair at the head of the room, looking like she was holding court.
Theron took up a post at the fireplace with his hands behind his back as he surveyed the leather sofas, the rug, the rust-and-ocher painting over the mantel.
“Nadia’s taste, I presume,” he said.
“She could make anything presentable,” Orsala added. “Even a house in Texas.”
I let that one go by. Absorb, I told myself, an old corner man’s instruction floating up from my fighting days. Absorb, don’t swing.
“Bring him to me,” Orsala said, snapping her fingers at Lola.
Lola looked at me from the kitchen entry, checking with me before obeying somebody else’s orders. I nodded, and I took my son off her hip myself. If somebody was going to hand him over, it was going to be his father.
Otto’s sun hat was crooked, and he smelled like sunscreen and playground mulch. He grabbed my tusk on the way. Then I set him down on his grandmother’s cream linen lap.
“There,” Orsala said. To him, not me. “Let me look at you.”
Otto looked back at her skeptically. Hannah appeared with iced tea glasses and set them on the coffee table. She was easing toward the kitchen with the body language of staff who knew when to vanish.
“We’ll take hot tea,” Orsala said to Lola without turning her head. “We don’t drink it iced.”
Lola glanced at me one more time. “Of course, ma’am,” Lola said, disappearing into the kitchen.
Otto twisted around on Orsala’s knee, craning toward Hannah, and he let out a wail. Drool slid down his chin, headed straight for the linen. Orsala produced a pressed handkerchief from her purse and wiped it away.
“He’s teething,” Hannah offered from the edge of the room. “His tusks are coming in. The drool’s the worst of it, poor little guy.”
Orsala’s eyes lifted from the baby and found Hannah. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
“And who,” she said, “is this?”
“Hannah Brooks,” I said before Hannah could. “Otto’s nanny.”
“The nanny.” Orsala set the word down like she was weighing it. “Then why was my grandson at a public playground with the housekeeper?”
“That’s my fault,” Hannah said. “I was under the weather this morning, and Lola offered to take him so I could rest. I’m feeling much better now.” She said it with her open face and her easy smile.
I watched Orsala take inventory. Hannah’s damp hair. My damp hair. The hour, half past ten on a Tuesday, the master of the house home in his kitchen. Her nostrils flared.
“No office today, Brakkus?” Theron asked.
“I own the company,” I said. “The hours are one of the perks.”
“Mm,” Theron said.
Otto whined and reached toward Hannah again. Orsala turned him back around on her knee like she was adjusting a picture frame.
“He’s lighter than he should be,” she said.
“He’s been gaining beautifully,” Hannah said. “The teething set his appetite back, but he’s taking two helpings at breakfast now. The healer’s very happy with?—”
“Has he?”
The question was aimed at Hannah, but I wanted to grab it out of the air before it touched her. But I didn’t move. The second I defended her against them, they’d know exactly what she was to me. That wasn’t something I wanted to deal with before I’d even told her. So I sat there and did nothing.
Lola came back with a tray. She’d used the tea set Nadia had brought from the Old Quarter, the one no one had touched in six months. Orsala smiled in recognition as Lola poured their cups.
Theron finally left the fireplace and sat on the sofa across from me, pinching the crease of his trousers. He took a sip of tea and looked at his grandson for a long moment. The crooked sun hat, the little tusks coming in white at the front of his mouth.
“He has her eyes,” Theron said.
For one second the old man’s face softened, looking at the only piece of his daughter left in the world. Then it hardened again.
He set his cup down. “Brakkus,” he said. “Orsala and I didn’t fly across the country for tea.”
“I figured.”
“There’s a matter we’ve come to discuss. It concerns Otto.” His gaze moved, slow and deliberate, from my son on his wife’s lap to Hannah standing at the edge of the room with her hands folded. It stopped there.
He reached into a satchel, drew out a magazine, and tossed it onto my coffee table. It slid across the wood face up.
Otto stared out from the cover. Slumped in his high chair in my kitchen, drool on his chin, eyes gone to the middle distance, looking exactly as lost as a stranger had arranged him to look. THE brUTE’S FORGOTTEN BOY, the headline said.
The real boy sat on his grandmother’s lap, fed and tanned from the sun, reaching for his nanny.