Page 201 of The Orc's Captive Bride
Three months of watching her transform from a terrified scholar thrust into an impossible situation to… this. A woman who commanded respect not through fear or intimidation, but through genuine competence and care.
The transition hadn’t gone smoothly.
Lasseran’s favored nobles—the ones who’d grown rich and powerful through corruption and cruelty—had been furious at their loss of influence. Lord Cassian had tried to organize opposition in the first week, arguing loudly at the city council meetings that a foreign woman with no noble blood had no right to rule Velmora.
He’d fallen silent when Vorlag had calmly presented documented evidence of his embezzlement from the city’s coffers—evidence that Thea had discovered buried in the archives during one of her marathon research sessions.
Most of the others had learned quickly. Thea might be new to rulership, but she was brilliant, thorough, and had an entire library of historical records at her disposal. She knew what they’d done and what they were capable of.
And she had Vorlag, the Veilborn, and a cadre of fiercely loyal orc warriors to support her.
Still, some had been slower learners than others.
“Are you going to stand there watching me work, or did you actually need something?” she asked, a smile tugging at her lips despite her focused expression.
“Can’t I simply enjoy the view?”
That made her look up, grey eyes bright with amusement behind her glasses.
“The view of me buried in bureaucratic paperwork? Your tastes have gotten very strange, my love.”
He crossed the room in three long strides, circling behind her desk. The grain reports—she hadn’t been lying about what she was working on—were covered in her precise handwriting. Notes about distribution patterns, population density, storage capacity.
She’d started with food.
The first reform she’d implemented as queen was ensuring that no one in Kel’Vara went hungry. Not the street children in the lower city or the elderly who could no longer work. Not the refugees who’d fled Lasseran’s purges in the countryside.
The nobles had protested, claiming such generosity would empty the treasury. Thea had calmly demonstrated that Lasseran’s vanity projects—the elaborate palace renovations, the excessive military parades, the obscenely expensive magical experiments—had cost triple what feeding the city’s poor would require.
She’d redirected those funds without hesitation and the people loved her for it. Genuinely, fiercely loved her in a way they’d never loved Lasseran—which had made certain powerful individuals very nervous.
“You’ll ruin your eyes reading by lamplight,” he said, reaching down to pluck the pen from her fingers.
“Hey—”
He set the pen aside and swiveled her chair away from the desk, then bent and lifted her smoothly into his arms.
“Khorrek!” She laughed, the sound warming something deep in his chest. “I was working!”
“You’re always working.” He settled into her chair—which creaked ominously under his weight but held—and arranged her comfortably on his lap. “Rest.”
She made a token protest, but he felt her relax against him almost immediately, her head finding the curve of his shoulder with practiced ease.
Mine, his Beast purred with satisfaction.Safe. Here.
The mate bond thrummed between them, content and settled in a way that still sometimes surprised him. Three months, and he’d never once regretted his choice to walk away from everything he’d known.
Not when she smiled at him over breakfast or when she fell asleep against him while reading in bed. Especially not when she stood before the city council and calmly dismantled some noble’s self-serving argument with historical precedent and pure logic.
“How was the patrol?” she asked, her fingers absently tracing patterns on his chest.
“Quiet. Grask spotted some suspicious activity near the eastern warehouses, but it turned out to be smugglers. The normal kind, not political insurgents.”
She hummed an acknowledgement. She knew about the threats they’d been monitoring, like some of the senior officers in Lasseran’s army who’d been less than pleased about the new regime. The ones who remembered the old ways fondly and whispered about returning to “proper order.”
He and his orc warriors had eliminated a few of those threats—quick, efficient removals before they could organize anything dangerous.
He hadn’t told her the specifics, preferring not to burden her with the bloody details of how those particular problems were being solved, but he suspected she knew anyway. She was too intelligent not to notice patterns, too thorough not to question why certain troublesome individuals had suddenly… relocated to distant posts or vanished entirely.
