Page 83 of Orc'd At A Wedding
"Bliss, the gala is a formal?—"
"He owns six bespoke suits, Mum. He'll be the best-dressed person there. He'll also be the tallest, the broadest, and genuinely the most intimidating, but I figure that's your problem to manage, not mine."
Another pause. Longer this time.
Olog appears in the kitchen doorway, watching me with those silver eyes, one shoulder against the frame. He has an expression that might generously be described as neutral and is actually deeply attentive. He is listening to every word. His hearing is approximately four times sharper than mine, which I have stopped finding unsettling and started finding incredibly convenient.
"Fine," my mother says, which is not a word she uses lightly or without significant internal suffering. "We will see you both on Saturday."
"Brilliant. Can't wait."
I hang up.
Olog raises one dark brow.
"She capitulated in under ninety seconds," he says. "I had projected a four-minute negotiation."
"She wasn't expecting me to push back." I toss my phone onto the cushion beside me. "She never is."
He crosses the room and sits beside me, the sofa registering his weight in a way that subtly tilts the entire cushion toward him. I've stopped fighting the gravitational pull. I just lean in.
"Are you prepared for Saturday?" he asks.
"For the first time in my life," I say, and I genuinely mean it, "yes."
Saturday arrivesin the form of sharp winter light and the smell of Olog's bergamot cologne filling the apartment while he dresses with the focused precision of someone preparing for a military operation. I watch him from the bed, my chin propped on my hand, and I think that if I had to describe him to someone who had never seen him, I would simply sayimagine the most beautiful, terrifying thing you have ever encounteredand then triple it.
The suit is charcoal this time, nearly black, with a deep teal silk tie that does something extraordinary against his ash-gray skin. The tattoos climb his throat above his collar, the intricate black lines of his grandmother's soup recipes curving over his jaw, and he adjusts his cufflinks with complete, unhurried calm.
"You're staring," he says, without turning around.
"Aggressively," I confirm.
The corner of his mouth moves.
I get up and find my dress, a deep burgundy silk that I bought specifically for tonight, specifically because it is the color of quiet confidence and absolutely nothing to do with making Olog's silver eyes track me across a room. That is simply a bonus I have chosen to accept.
He turns when I step into it and does the zip up my back with one careful hand, his fingertips barely grazing my spine, and I feel it down to my heels.
"Adequate," he says.
"You absolute menace."
"You look exceptional," he corrects, his voice dropping a register. "I am practicing restraint."
I turn and straighten his tie, which doesn't need straightening, and he lets me do it anyway.
"Okay," I say. "Let's go terrify my family."
The gala is heldin a restored Victorian ballroom in the city center, the kind of venue where every surface is either marble or gilt and the waitstaff have been trained to move silently and never make eye contact. My family hires this room every December. Nearly every December of my adult life I’ve walked into it with my stomach in knots, rehearsing my answers to their questions in the car on the way over, pre-emptively bracing for the comments about my career and my flat and my relationship status and my hair.
Tonight I walk in on Olog's arm.
He has to angle his shoulders slightly to clear the door.
I watch the room register him in real time. It moves like a wave, that moment of collective recalibration, the way a crowded space full of confident, wealthy people suddenly and unanimously decides that perhaps standing directly in the path of the massive tattooed Orc in the charcoal suit is not the evening's wisest social strategy. Conversations don't stop exactly, but they pause, readjust, resume at a slightly higher pitch. A waiter with a tray of champagne flutes executes a smooth, instinctive arc around us.
Olog doesn't notice. Or rather, he notices everything and is moved by none of it. His hand covers mine on his arm, warm and certain, and he scans the room once with those silver eyes in the way he always does, cataloguing exits and threats and the locations of people he has pre-identified in the binder as requiring monitoring.
