Chapter 4
Rex
The lean orc lifts the telephoto lens and aims it at the clubhouse.
I'm two hundred yards east, belly flat on the fire road ridge, pine needles grinding into my forearms through the leather.
Binoculars up. Phone propped on a root beside me with the camera open.
Different SUV this morning, silver instead of black, newer model, rental sticker on the rear bumper. Same bare plate frame. Same two orcs.
The bearded orc sits on the hood with a tablet balanced on his thigh, marking something on screen with a stylus. He draws a line, lifts his head, draws another. The lean one sweeps the lens in a slow arc: clubhouse, garage, the Anchor's rooftop, the harbour. He pauses on the Anchor.
They arrived at 5:30. Yesterday, 5:15. Friday, 5:02. They're settling into a pattern, which means they're getting comfortable, which means they haven't spotted me. Good. The minute I stop being invisible, everything I've watched in the last four days goes in the trash.
I photograph the SUV, the rental sticker, the bearded orc's tablet.
The lean one's posture behind the camera.
His elbows brace wide on the guardrail and his weight shifts forward onto the balls of his feet, balanced, coiled.
Military or paramilitary. Knox said Bloodstone trains their scouts in pairs, one observer and one recorder.
By 6:12, they pack up. The tablet goes in a case.
The telephoto breaks down into components that fit inside a padded bag, the lean one scans the road north and south before he gets in the passenger seat.
The SUV pulls out and heads south on the coast highway, turn signal on, holding the speed limit.
I wait ten minutes after they leave, then belly-crawl back to where I stashed the bike behind a fallen Douglas fir.
My map is spread on the seat. I mark the overlook: third morning, observation point number one.
I mark the logging road east of the clubhouse where I found fresh tire tracks Wednesday afternoon, point two.
And the pull-off near the harbour with a clear sightline to the Anchor's front door, point three.
Three positions. Three approach routes. A triangle drawn around everything that matters.
The Anchor sits inside all three sightlines. I circle it on the map and stare at the circle until I'm sure I'm looking at it for tactical reasons.
Knox reads my report at the kitchen table in his house while Sarah feeds Reeve in the next room. I hear the baby fussing through the wall, a thin intermittent sound that stops each time Sarah murmurs to him. Knox doesn't look up from the map.
I've laid it out in the order he prefers. Photos first, annotated. Arrival and departure times in a grid. The three observation points marked with distances and lines of sight. Approach routes drawn in red, alternate routes in blue. Four days of data compressed onto one page.
Knox turns the map ninety degrees and traces the triangle with his index finger. He stops at the circle around the Anchor.
"How long have they been running this pattern?"
"At least a week before I spotted them. The tire tracks at point two had four days of needle fall."
"And they haven't deviated."
"They already know where we are. Now they're learning our routines, positions, who goes where at what time. Building a picture." I tap the Anchor. "They're spending more time on the bar than the clubhouse. Second day in a row the lean one held on the Anchor's rooftop for longer."
Knox's face gives nothing, but his hand flattens on the table and the tendons pull taut under his skin. Sarah laughs at something in the other room, a bright sound that doesn't belong anywhere near this conversation.
"How many?"
"Same two every morning. Could rotate others I haven't seen yet, but the bearded orc and the lean orc are consistent."
"Keep tracking. Don't engage. I want two full weeks of data before we move."
I nod and start folding the map.
"Rex."
I stop.
Knox pushes his chair back and studies me. Body language, scent, the angle of my shoulders and what it costs me to hold them level.
"The brothers have noticed that you've been sleeping in the garage. Is there something wrong with your apartment?" Not a question. He can smell it on me: motor oil and cold concrete and the absence of anything warm.
"Apartment's fine. I've been working late."
Knox doesn't push. He nods once and turns back to the map, and I'm grateful for the out because the truth is uglier than sleeping on a shop floor.
The truth is that my apartment smells like Holly—her shampoo ground into the pillow she used to sleep on, the cherry bourbon she spilled on the kitchen counter three weeks ago that I never wiped up because cleaning it felt like erasing her.
The truth is that the hair tie she left on my bathroom sink sits where she put it, a black elastic loop curled on the porcelain lip, and I've looked at it every morning since she left it there and I haven't touched it once.
Evening. I've been avoiding the Anchor for two days.
Two days since Holly stood behind the bar and cut me open with a sentence I can't shake loose.
You don't get to be jealous of a man who asked me out to dinner.
Not when you can't even stay till morning.
I've replayed it on every mile of fire road, every hour of scout surveillance, every cold night on the shop floor with my jacket balled under my head.
She's right. That's the part I can't get around, and I've got no counter, and the word that's been hammering at the base of my skull for six months doesn't care whether I'm ready.
I go to the Anchor because the apartment is a museum of things I can't bring myself to touch, the scout work is done for the day, and the silence in my own head is louder than any bar on a Sunday night.
My stool. My bourbon. The dent in the brass rail where my hand bent it the night Finn ran his mouth about Holly's legs.
Holly isn't there.
Sal stands behind the taps. The old troll fills my glass without asking, sets it down, and goes back to polishing a tumbler with a cloth that's seen more nights than most buildings in this town. The regulars murmur in the back booth. The jukebox is off.
I look at Holly's station. The speed rail she keeps organized by height.
The photos she's tacked to the back mirror: the harbour at dawn, a fishing boat listing at its mooring, Griz framed in the doorway with the neon bleeding across his stone face.
Her jacket isn't on the hook. Her bag isn't under the bar.
"Where is she?"
Sal doesn't look up. "Out."
I wait. Sal lets me wait. Four hundred years of pouring drinks means she knows a silence will do more damage than anything she could say.
"The writer. Tyler." Sal sets the glass down and picks up another one. "Took her to that steak place on the harbour." She doesn't look at me. "Second date."
My hand closes around the tumbler. The bourbon shakes in the glass. Sal glances at my hands, then goes back to wiping. Four hundred years behind a bar means she's seen worse than a tight grip.
The glass survives. So does the bourbon. I sit there nursing it with nowhere to go, because leaving means admitting I'm waiting for a woman who isn't waiting for me.
Sal wipes the bar in front of me, slow and deliberate. She refills my glass without being asked.
"You know," she says, "I poured his drinks all night when he started coming in here. He tips twenty percent and asks me how my evening's going."
I set my glass down. "I tip thirty."
"You tip thirty and leave the woman I raised behind this bar crying in her apartment at three in the morning." Sal's voice doesn't change. "Doesn't take much to see which one of you is worth more of her time, Rex. Even for trolls."
I don't answer. Sal moves down the bar and doesn't say another word.
An hour passes. I nurse the second bourbon and stare at the photos tacked to Holly's mirror.
The harbour shot is new, a long-exposure print, the dock lights streaked into gold ribbons across the black water.
She shot it from the pier, alone, two or three in the morning when the fishing boats come in.
The composition is sharp and deliberate.
I never asked to see her photographs. Six months with my hands on her body and I never asked.
The front door opens.
Cold air and the smell of rain, and then Holly walks in. Jacket zipped to her chin. Cheeks flushed from the wind. She's laughing at something on her phone, a bright, loose sound, thumb scrolling as she pushes through with her shoulder.
She stops when she sees me.
The laugh cuts out. Her face shuts down, and the look she gives me isn't angry or sad. It's the look of a woman who already said everything she needed to say.
She doesn't say anything. She walks behind the bar, grabs a water bottle from the mini fridge, and twists the cap off.
I catch it then. Tyler's cologne again. Not on her jacket.
On her skin. Her neck. The hollow below her ear where someone leaned in close, goodbye kiss or just close enough that his cologne sank into her skin.
My nostrils flare. Every nerve in my body fires at once—the territorial drive grinding up through my chest, the possessive fury that narrows my vision to the point on her neck where another man's scent sits on skin I've tasted, and underneath both of them, louder than anything, a sound like a door being kicked open from the inside:
Mate.
Not a whisper this time. Not the low hum I've been drowning out with engine noise and highway miles for months.
The word cracks through my skull in the old language, the one nobody taught me, the one Knox said finds you whether you're looking for it or not.
It found me the first time Holly touched my tusks.
It found me every time her scent shifted around me, every time she walked into a room and my whole body oriented toward her like a compass needle locking north.
I buried it because the last time something felt like mine—a woman named Mrs. Franklin, a bedroom with blue walls, game balls on a shelf beside her son's trophies and eight months that felt like a life—ended with a social worker's car in the driveway and the back door already open.
The cologne on Holly's neck rips the burial open and leaves it bleeding in the dirt.
"Don't." Holly's voice carries nothing. She doesn't look at me.
"Don't what?"
"Whatever that face is. Whatever you're about to say." She caps the water bottle. "Just don't."
I grip the bar with both hands. My knuckles go white against the wood. The word roars through me and I clamp my jaw shut around it because saying it out loud makes it real.
Holly takes her water bottle and walks to the back stairs. She doesn't turn around. The door swings shut behind her and the sound echoes through the empty bar like a period at the end of a sentence I didn't get to finish.
Sal collects my glass. She doesn't offer a refill.
Garrett sits on the steps outside my apartment above the garage.
I don't know how long he's been there. Could be an hour, could be ten minutes. The minotaur doesn't fidget, doesn't check his phone, doesn't shift his weight. He sits with his forearms on his knees. The security light above the bay doors throws his shadow long across the gravel.
I drop onto the step beside him. The concrete is cold through my jeans.
I lean forward and put my head in my hands and press my palms against my eyes until the pressure builds into a point I can focus on instead of the cologne on her neck, the dead weight of her voice, her back turning away from me.
Garrett doesn't ask. He sits with me in the cold, breathing in the slow steady rhythm I've heard him use when the nightmares pull him out of sleep and he needs to remind his body where he is. Twenty minutes of silence. Neither of us moves.
"You look like a man running from something that's already caught him."
"Yeah." My voice comes out scraped raw.
Garrett nods. He stands and pauses at the bottom of the steps. He doesn't turn all the way around, just angles his head enough that the edge of his jaw and the horn stump show against the night sky. "I pushed Nina away thinking it'd keep her safe. Almost lost her for good. Don't do the same thing."
"I know."
Then he's gone, his footsteps fading into the gravel, and I sit on the steps with my jaw aching, my hands shaking, and a word I can't say pressing against my molars like it's trying to crack through bone.