Chapter 10
Rex
Four a.m. and the alley behind the Rusty Anchor smells like dumpster runoff and old rain, and I've ridden three hundred miles south with my hands shaking on the grips and my phone burning a hole against my ribs.
Knox briefed, scout intel sent, Road Captain duties squared.
None of that matters standing below this window.
Her light is on because she heard the engine. Holly knows the sound of my Harley the way I know the sound of her laugh across a crowded bar.
I take the stairs. My boots hit every step loud enough that she'll hear me coming, because I'm done showing up quiet. My hand lifts and knocks at her door.
The door opens.
Holly stands in a tank top and sweats with her camera in one hand and a coffee mug in the other.
Behind her, photographs hang on the clothesline across her kitchen, prints dripping onto newspaper.
Her eyes find mine and I brace for anger, for the cold shutdown I deserve, for the door closing in my face.
She doesn't give me any of it.
Her expression is one I've never seen on her. Not the sharp cut of hurt or the wall she builds when I've let her down. Not the fire she throws when she's pissed. A woman who already knows her answer and is waiting to hear if I have one.
"I came back."
"You come back every time, Rex." Her voice holds steady. "Then you leave again."
"Not this time."
"Prove it."
She doesn't move from the doorway. The coffee steams in her hand. A print drips behind her—I catch the edge of it over her shoulder, a black and white silhouette I can't make out.
The charm doesn't come. The grin that's gotten me through fifteen years of ducking conversations, the easy joke, the pivot to something physical—none of it fires.
I'm standing in her doorway with hundreds of miles of highway grime on my jacket and road salt caked into the creases of my boots, and the only thing left in my chest is the truth.
"Can I come in?"
"Depends on what you came to say."
I look at her. My hands won't stop shaking. Not from the cold, not from the ride. From the words building in my throat that I've spent six months burying.
"My parents were killed during the Emergence.
I was nine." It comes out rough, like dragging a chain across gravel.
"By a mob—humans who saw orcs for the first time and decided we were the threat.
I don't remember much. I remember a nice older human lady's kitchen, the social worker's car and then ten years of nobody keeping me. "
Holly's mouth presses into a line but her eyes don't leave mine.
"The Petersons kept me for four months." "I had a room with a window that faced a backyard.
A dog. Retriever named Buddy. Mrs. Peterson packed lunches for me with a juice box and a note that said Have a great day, Rex!
with a smiley face." I swallow. "She wrote them every morning.
I kept every note in a shoebox under my bed. "
Holly's mug lowers an inch.
"They sent me back because Mr. Peterson got transferred to a smaller office and they couldn't afford a third kid. The social worker let me keep the shoebox. I threw it out of the car window on the highway because I didn't want to look at it anymore."
Her lips part. She doesn't speak.
"The group home in Salem, a kid named Derek stole my shoes the first night.
Not because he needed shoes. Because I had them and he could take them.
I walked barefoot for two days before they replaced them.
" My molars grind until my jaw aches. "The last placement—a man named Michael locked me in the basement when I broke a dish.
A cereal bowl. I dropped it washing dishes and it cracked on the counter, and he grabbed me by the back of the neck and put me in the basement and locked the deadbolt. "
Holly's knuckles go white on the mug handle.
"I picked the lock with a paperclip at two in the morning.
Stole his motorcycle. Rode nine hours straight.
Didn't stop until I hit a gas station in Coos Bay and the bike ran out of fuel.
I sat on the curb with thirty-five cents in my pocket and no shoes that fit right, and I thought—this is it.
This is the first thing in my life I didn't have to wait for someone to take away.
I had the keys. I decided when to stay and when to go. "
The silence stretches.
"Holly." My voice strips down. "The first night you touched my tusks. Six months ago, in this apartment, on that couch. You traced the edge of the cap with your thumb and a word cracked through my skull like a fissure. Old orc language—I don't speak it. Nobody taught me, but it found me anyway."
Her chin lifts. Her eyes lock on mine and don't let go.
"Mate." The word comes out in the old language first, guttural, from a place deeper than my throat.
Then in English. "It means you're mine and I'm yours and it's permanent.
Biological. The kind of permanent I've never had in my life.
" My whole body vibrates—hands, jaw, the muscles across my shoulders.
"I heard it and I panicked. Six months of panicking.
Because the last time something felt permanent, a woman told me they didn't have room anymore. "
Holly sets her camera on the shelf beside the door. Sets her coffee down. Her hands hang free at her sides, and I watch her fingers curl into her palms and release.
"Six months, Rex." The words come out low and even, which is worse than if she'd yelled. "You've been carrying that around for six months and you let me think I was just some girl you fucked when you felt like it."
"That's not—"
"Don't." Her hand comes up. "Don't tell me what it wasn't. Tell me why you didn't say anything."
"Because the last time I let myself believe something would last, I ended up in the back of a social worker's car."
My pulse hammers loud enough to hear in my ears, and my scenting catches a note on her I can't place—not anger, not grief. Layered. Complex. I've spent months reading Holly's emotions through scent, and this one is new.
"Tell me again." She takes a single step closer. Close enough that the bourbon-and-dark-cherries scent of her skin fills my lungs, the warmth underneath that I've chased through every mile of highway between here and nowhere.
I meet her eyes. The word rises and I let it come.
"Mate." The old language. "You're my mate. My fated mate. Mine. And I love you. I've loved you since the moment I met you, I was just too stupid to see it. I couldn't say it because every time I've loved something, it disappeared. And I thought if I said it out loud, it would happen again."
Holly doesn't move. Her jaw tightens and her eyes go glassy and she lets me see all of it—the anger and the relief and the six months of hurt I put there. She bites down on her bottom lip hard enough that the skin goes white, holds it, and then lets go.
"The first thing I did when I left was text Knox. Two words. Protect her. Before I packed my bag. Before I started the bike. The only thing in my head was making sure someone had eyes on you."
Her hand lifts and presses flat against my chest, right over my heartbeat. She holds it there for a long moment.
"If you're here in the morning," she says, "we talk about what happens next. If you're gone, then don't fucking come back. I mean it, Rex. I won't do this again."
"I'll be here, I promise."
"Don't promise me. Prove it to me."
She takes my hand. Her fingers lace through mine and pull, and I cross the threshold into her apartment. The door closes behind me. She turns the deadbolt. The click echoes in the kitchen.
Her fingers curl into my jacket and she tugs me down the hallway.
Past the photographs on the clothesline.
Past the kitchen counter where she sat in October with her legs crossed and a glass of bourbon and told me to stop hovering.
Into the bedroom where the streetlight falls through the window in a stripe across the unmade sheets.
She turns and faces me and puts her hands on my jaw. Her thumbs trace the edges of my tusk caps, slow, deliberate, and Mate fires again—but I don't shove it down. I let it burn.
Holly pushes my jacket off my shoulders and drops it on the floor.
Her hands slide under my shirt, palms flat against my stomach, and she lifts it over my head.
My skin prickles in the cold air and then her palms smooth across my ribs, tracing the tattoo sleeve down my left arm, every line of ink she's touched a hundred times in the dark but never like this.
She takes her time. Reading me with her hands the way she reads light through a camera lens.
I pull her tank top over her head and her breasts press bare against my chest, nipples hard from the cold, and the heat of her skin against mine sends a shudder through me that has nothing to do with temperature.
My hands settle on her waist and I press my forehead to hers and breathe her in, my scenting cracks wide open.
Not just bourbon and dark cherries. Not just the warm leather-and-sun base I've memorized over months of pulling her scent into my lungs and pretending I didn't need it. Underneath all of that, for the first time—clean and steady and green, like new growth after a burn.
Trust.
I've scented anger on her. Arousal. Grief. Hurt so deep it bruised the air between us. Never trust. The fated mate bond—months of suppressed connection—tears loose in my chest and my hands tighten on her waist because my knees almost buckle.
"Rex." She says my name against my mouth. "Stay the whole night."
"I'm staying."
"Promise me."
"I promise, baby."
Her mouth finds mine. Her lips part and I taste coffee and Holly, the taste I know alongside every sound she makes when I touch her.
I kiss her back with my hands cupping her face, thumbs against her cheekbones, pulling her so close her breasts flatten against my chest and I can feel her heartbeat against mine.