Page 21 of The Orc's Captive Bride
But he never did.
Instead, he would lie still in the predawn darkness, listening to her breathe, and feeling her warmth against his side. He would tell himself it meant nothing and that the satisfaction he feltwhen she sighed in her sleep and burrowed against him was purely professional.
Lies. All lies.
By the fourth morning, his arm was around her waist before he even woke fully. By the fifth, she fit against him like she’d been shaped for that exact space.
This has to stop, he told himself, but he made no move to change it. And when she woke that fifth morning, blinking sleepily up at him with those frost-colored eyes soft and unguarded, he didn’t look away.
“Morning,” she murmured, her voice still heavily accented.
“Vel’korah,” he corrected automatically.
“Vel’ko… rah.” She yawned, showing small white teeth. “Your language is hard.”
“Yours is soft,” he said automatically, and she laughed.
“Soft,” she repeated, still smiling.“I’ve never heard English called soft before.”
He sat up, gently dislodging her. The other males were already stirring, eager to reach the city.
“Where are we?” she asked in his language.
“Close.”
“Close to Kel’Vara?”
He nodded, and something flickered across her face he couldn’t decipher. It wasn’t quite fear, or even resignation, but something too complex for him to read.
“Then what happens to me?” she asked quietly, still in his language, her voice small and careful.
Then I deliver you to Lasseran. Then you lose whatever protection I can offer. Then you become whatever the High King wants you to be, and I go back to my duties and try to forget?—
“Tharak koreth nash,” he said again. I don’t know.
But this time it was definitely a lie.
They crested the final ridge as the sun began its descent toward the horizon.
And there, glowing in the last rays of sunlight, was Kel’Vara.
The city clung to a rocky promontory jutting into the Southern Sea, its architecture an oddly harmonious mix of elegant palazzos and brutal fortifications. From this distance, it looked beautiful—dark stone and elegant spires that caught the golden light, with ships in the harbor below and the Obsidian Keep rising like a dark finger pointing at the sky.
He knew better.
Up close, those elegant buildings housed courtiers who traded in secrets and assassinations. Those ships with the colorful sails carried slaves and weapons and the spoils of conquest. The Obsidian Tower was where Lasseran held court, dispensing judgment and death with equal caprice.
Kel’Vara was beautiful and terrible in equal measure, like the High King himself.
“Vorath,” she breathed. Sky. Then, catching herself: “No. Bahkar. Kel’Vara.”
She twisted in the saddle to look up at Khorrek. “It’s… big.”
That was one word for it.
“Many people,” he said. “Dangerous.”
He expected the usual questions. He expected her to ask about the danger, about what awaited her, and about what she should expect, but instead she simply looked at him. Really looked, in the way she had that made him feel like she was reading something written on his face in a language only she understood.
