Chapter 6
Colt
Five a.m. and my coffee sits untouched on the kitchen table because I keep lifting the mug and setting it back down without drinking.
The house ticks around me in the dark, the furnace cycling, rain tapping the gutters, Lily asleep down the hall, dead to the world the way only a twelve-year-old can be.
I can still smell Ellie on my hands.
Twelve hours since I left the library parking lot.
I've showered, eaten, gone through the motions of a normal night.
My hands are clean. My orc senses don't care, they locked onto her scent the moment I touched her and they won't let go, the same way they locked onto Maren's nineteen years ago in a lecture hall at Portland State, I carried that scent in my head for the rest of her life and for eight years after it ended.
Ellie pulled my glasses off. Both hands, careful, and she set them on the shelf behind her before she kissed me back. I held her against the stacks and her legs wrapped around my waist and the sound she made when I touched her—
The claiming instinct hit me in the library.
Orc-deep, bone-level, a drive that doesn't negotiate.
Claim. Mark. Mine. My tusks scraped her collarbone and every cell in my body screamed to bite down and make her mine permanently.
The last time I let that instinct win, I gave Maren the claiming bite in our bedroom with candles she bought at the farmer's market and her laugh still in my ears.
Years later I felt her heartbeat stop through the bond.
I held her hand for twenty minutes after the nurses told me to let go because I could still feel the echo, fading, thinning, gone.
The coffee goes cold. I pour it down the drain and make a fresh pot.
Saturday unfolds the way I need it to: tasks with outcomes I can predict.
Breakfast for Lily: scrambled eggs, toast, the orange juice she likes from the farm stand.
She comes downstairs with her hair in a knot and the Butler tucked under one arm and eats without looking up from the page.
I clean the kitchen. I open the club ledger and reconcile the reimbursements I've been putting off for a week.
I cross-reference receipts, flag two duplicate entries, email Knox the updated numbers. The columns balance.
At ten o'clock Lily packs her backpack. Library books, notebook, the pencil case she keeps in the front pocket. She stands by the door with the bag over one shoulder and waits.
"Not today, Lil."
She looks at me. I don't explain. She unzips the bag, puts the books back on the hall table, and walks to the couch without a word. She doesn't ask why. Her silence is worse.
By two I've rearranged the garage shelving, restocked the pantry from the list on the fridge, and started a batch of soup from Maren's recipe card for minestrone.
The card has a note in the margin in her handwriting: Double the garlic.
The house fills with the smell of it, warm and grounding, and for ten minutes I don't think about the library.
Then I reach for the burner and catch it again—the memory of Ellie's pussy gripping my fingers. I grip the counter and breathe through my nose and the memory hits me so hard my vision blurs.
Eight years since I've lost control. Eight years of morning routines and ledgers and Lily's school schedule and the deliberate, measured life I built around the hole Maren left. Last night I held a woman against a bookshelf and my hands shook.
I stir the soup. I don't call Ellie and I don't text her and I don't think about whether she's waiting for me to do either.
Bruiser finds me in the garage at four. I don't hear his truck pull up. He leans in the doorway with his arms crossed and a toothpick between his teeth.
"New guest at the Cove Hotel," he says. "Derek Frost. Checked in yesterday. Rented a car."
My hand stills on the toolbox lid.
"Ellie's ex." Bruiser shifts the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "I know everything, brother."
He pushes off the doorframe and walks back toward the street. I stand in my garage holding a socket wrench with the name of a man I've never met lodged in my throat.
Lily asks Sunday morning if I'll take her to the library. Her holds came in and she's out of books, she asks with the careful tone she uses when she knows I'll say no but tries anyway. I say yes before I've thought about it, and I don't examine why.
I pull into the library lot and Lily unbuckles before I've cut the engine. I follow her inside and my eyes find Ellie at the circulation desk before I've crossed the threshold, the scenting pulling me to her like it has for months.
A man leans against the desk.
Tall, for a human. Dark hair styled in a way that takes effort and money. Pressed shirt, no wrinkles, the collar open. He stands with one elbow on the desk and his body angled toward Ellie, leaning into her space like he still has the right.
Ellie's face tells me everything. Her smile locked in place, the professional mask she keeps for patrons who argue about late fees.
Her shoulders sit high and rigid. The smell rolling off her cuts through the library's baseline of old paper and lemon cleaner, sharp and acidic, the note I've learned means stress.
Lily stops three steps inside the door.
"That's your ex-husband." Lily doesn't bother keeping her voice down. "The one who left."
The man turns. He has to look up to meet my face, and whatever he expected to find in this library, it isn't me.
His composure cracks for half a second. A flinch around his left eye, the stiffening through his shoulders. Then he pulls it together, straightens, and extends a hand toward me with a smile that belongs in a conference room.
"You must be one of Ellie's neighbors."
I don't take his hand.
"I'm Lily's father," I say. "Ellie is my daughter's favorite person in the world."
The hand stays out for two more seconds. Then it drops.
"I'm her husband." Derek adjusts his collar.
"Ex-husband."
The correction lands quiet. I don't raise my voice.
My orc scenting reads him in the same breath—cologne, expensive, layered over dry cleaning chemicals and hotel soap.
And underneath: the sour, metallic edge of anxiety.
He reeks of it. Not just the fear of standing across from a six-foot-five orc with tusks and scarred knuckles.
Derek looks at Ellie. Back at me. He doesn't leave. Derek looks at Ellie. Back at me. He doesn't leave.
"Look, I appreciate the... community support.
" The pause before community is deliberate.
"But Ellie and I have things to discuss.
Private things. Family things." He adjusts his collar again.
"I've been reading about this town. About the club.
And I have to be honest, I'm concerned about the people she's gotten involved with.
" His eyes flick to my tusks. He doesn't try to hide it.
"She's in over her head. She just doesn't see it yet. "
The words land in the library's silence. The people she's gotten involved with. The language of concern wrapped around something uglier. I've seen and heard it before—on flyers tucked under windshield wipers, in anonymous letters the club intercepts before they reach the diner or the bar.
My hands stay at my sides. Lily is ten feet away. Ellie is behind the desk and I stand where I am.
"She's standing right there," I say. "You could try asking her."
Derek ignores me. He turns back to Ellie. "I just want to talk. That's all. Come get coffee with me. Five minutes."
"It has been five years, Derek." Ellie's voice comes from behind the desk. "I don't owe you five minutes."
"Ellie, I'm—"
"He looks like a man who returns books late and dog-ears the pages." Lily says from her table by the window, loud enough for every corner of the room. She sits with her legs crossed in the chair and the Butler open on her knee, not even looking up from her page.
Ellie's mouth twitches.
Derek looks from Lily to me to Ellie and back. The smile he arrived with has gone stiff at the edges, a mask cracking under the weight of three people in the room who aren't buying it. He smooths his collar again.
"I'll come back later," he says. "When you're not busy."
He walks past me. I don't move to make space. He turns sideways to fit through the gap between my shoulder and the door frame, the top of his head passes below my chin.
The library door closes behind him. His rental car starts in the lot. Ellie braces against the desk and exhales, a long breath that pulls the tension out of her shoulders in a single drop.
"Ellie—"
"Don't." She shakes her head. "Not right now. I'm okay."
She isn't. The stress-scent hasn't faded. But pushing her right now will cost me more than waiting. I nod.
"Lily, you ready?"
Lily packs her bag, zips it, slings it over one shoulder. She stops at the desk and squeezes Ellie's hand once. "See you Tuesday, Ellie."
"See you Tuesday, Lily."
We walk to the truck. Lily climbs in and buckles and opens her book. I sit behind the wheel. My fingers lock around the steering wheel and squeeze until the leather creaks.
"Dad?" Lily looks up from her book. "You okay?"
I loosen my grip. "Yeah, Lil. I'm good. Let's get you home."
Every instinct in my body wants to go back inside. The orc in me screams to scent-mark every inch of that building.
I start the truck instead.
The rain picks up on the drive home. Lily reads in the passenger seat, the book tilted to catch the dashboard light, and I grip the wheel and think about Derek Frost. Derek who can love a woman without a claiming bite.
Without a bond that lets him feel her pulse from across the room.
Derek who can lose someone and grieve like a human grieves—in memory, not in his blood and body.
Derek will never feel the exact moment a heartbeat stops because his body isn't wired into hers.
The thought sits in my gut like a stone.
Lily goes to bed at nine. One chapter, she promises. I give her two because I'm too tired to argue, and her light clicks off at nine-thirty.
I stand in the hallway while the house settles around me, pipes ticking, rain on the roof, the furnace cycling down for the night. I walk to my bedroom and open the bedside drawer.
My wedding band. Gold, plain. I've picked it up every night for eight years. I hold it in my palm and I talk to her, the same way I've talked to her since the funeral, and every night I've said the same thing. I'm still here.
Tonight I turn the ring over in my fingers and look at the photograph on the nightstand. Maren at twenty-nine, pregnant with Lily, sitting on the porch steps of this house with a book in her lap and her head thrown back laughing at something I said that I can't remember.
"I met someone." My voice sounds strange in the empty room. Rough. Too loud for the silence. "She runs a library. She fought for a kid in front of a room full of people and didn't flinch." I close my fingers around the ring. "You would have liked her."
The photograph doesn't answer. Maren's face stays frozen in that laugh, twenty-nine and alive and holding our daughter in her body.
The silence in the house changes. Not the empty silence I've carried since the funeral, the one that swallows everything and gives nothing back.