Page 55 of Claimed By the Orc Lord

With that handled and the only sound coming from him being low grunts of annoyance, I gripped the knife I’d used and spun in a slow circle.

Fuck… I was pretty sure Nash had told me something about directions and… flowers? Or trees? Or…

I glanced down at my would-be captor. “I don’t suppose you’d tell me how to get to the road again, would you?”

A sudden snarling sound in the distance snapped my head up. Obviously, it wasn’t the road I was looking for anymore. It had never taken Nash very long to catch up to me when I’d run off… this just wasn’t going the way it usually did.

I’d thought maybe he’d find me on the road and drag me off somewhere so we could fuck in the woods—maybe he’d spank me again and I’d get to suck his dick.

I didn’t think it would be…

Well. This?

But it was, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change that now, so I headed off toward the angry voices as quietly as I could. Something in my chest was pulling me in that direction—something caught behind my ribs like an invisible line leading me to where I needed to go.

To Nash.

It was ridiculous, and it didn’t make any sense. Neither did I half the time, so I went with it.

It took a good ten minutes of trailing after the noises before I finally caught up to them, and that was only because they’d stopped a few minutes before I did. Light filtered through the trees in front of me, and the noises were closer now.

Close enough I could make out that I couldn’t make out a damn thing they were saying.

Close enough I could still recognize the tone of one of the voices, even though I had no idea what the words were.

Except one.

My name.

Nash was saying my name, and all I wanted to do was run through the clearing to save him like we were in some kind of action movie.

That would probably be a really bad idea, especially since I didn’t know how many people were in the camp ahead of us, so I slowly made my way to the edge of the trees instead.

My eyes caught his form right away—he was tied in a sitting position to some kind of pole on the opposite side of the little camp. The only good thing about the situation was the fact that it looked like there were only a handful of enemies… because that’s what they were, wasn’t it?

Enemies.

People who wanted to hurt Nash.

People I would hurt if I had to, if it meant protecting the man I loved… because I still hadn’t actually told him I loved him, had I? We’d fucked, and he’d marked me, and we’d called each other mates, but somehow that word had never really come up.

I wanted to tell him.

I needed to tell him. Which meant that I needed to get him untied.

It was really more a question of how I was going to make that happen without alerting everyone in the camp to the fact that I was there. They were probably going to get curious anyway when their buddy didn’t show up with me. For all I knew, I hadn’t tied him up well enough, and he was going to show up and ruin everything.

I needed to do something, and I needed to do itnow.

And somehow, I knew that meant I needed Nash.

It really was lucky that Koth seemed to be more interested in himself than anything happening around him. He was standing with a small group of orcs—three, from what I could see—and there was a smirk on his face. He was probably telling them some huge lie about how he’d captured Nash, but judging by the familiar band of fabric I saw around Nash’s arm—streaked with my blood—I knew exactly how he’d actually done it.

He’d come because he thought I was in danger.

He was probably standing still because he thought I was tied up somewhere.

Which meant the first order of operations was to make sure that he knew I was fine.

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