Page 56 of Orc'd At A Wedding
The email from the agency arrived at 06:47, which means someone flagged the contract cancellation immediately and sent it up the chain with enough velocity to land in my inbox before the sun cleared the horizon. I read it twice, standing at the window with my phone casting a pale glow across my knuckles, and the second read does not substantially alter the content of the first.
Contract termination effective immediately. Violation of Standard Employment Protocol 3.7: Client Engagement Beyond Professional Parameters. Agency rating removed. All future booking requests denied. This action is final.
I pocket the phone.
The agency termination is not the problem. The five-star rating I spent three years building, the carefully maintained professional reputation, the steady stream of high-paying contracts that funded my grandmother's medical care and kept my younger sister in university, none of it registers as particularly significant in the immediate moment. I have savings. I have other skills. I can work security, close protection, private investigation. The gig economy will survive my exit.
The problem is standing in front of the window at 07:13 in the morning, fully dressed in a suit I had custom tailored because human formalwear does not account for Orc proportions, staring at my own reflection in the glass and seeing, with the clarity that only comes after a night of claiming your mate and waking up to the logistical realities of the world outside this hotel room, exactly what I am.
A heavily tattooed, six-foot-eleven Orc who works contract jobs and carries throwing knives in his boots and whose idea of courtship involves offering a blade in a parking lot and then breaking every rule in his employment contract to take a human woman to bed with enough intensity that the people in the neighbouring suites probably filed noise complaints.
Bliss Vance, by contrast, is a woman whose family owns vacation homes and whose cousin's wedding venue cost more than my annual income and who showed up to a destination wedding in a designer dress and heels that cost what I charge for three days of close protection work.
The gap between those two realities is not something I considered last night. Last night, standing in the parking lot with her tears on my shirt and her voice breaking as she yelled at me, the only reality that mattered was the biological certainty that she is mine and I am keeping her. The Orc part of my brain, the part that has been clawing its way to the surface since the hotel lobby, does not care about tax brackets or social standing or the fact that her family will take one look at me in the cold light of day and see exactly what I am.
A threat.
I exhale slowly, controlled, the way I was trained to do before entering a high-risk environment, and watch my breath fog faintly against the glass.
The bed shifts behind me.
I do not turn immediately. I am still running the calculations, still measuring what I have done, still trying to determine the correct course of action that does not involve dragging her into a life that will damage her reputation and her safety and her future. She is soft and human and deserves a partner who can take her to family events without her relatives flinching. She deserves someone who did not get fired from his primary income source because he could not keep his hands off her for forty-eight hours.
She deserves better than a man whose idea of conflict resolution involves physically removing threats and whose career involves getting between dangerous people and their targets.
The sheet rustles.
I hear her sit up.
I make myself turn.
She is smiling at me, sleep-warm and rumpled, her dark hair spilling across her bare shoulders, the morning light catching in her eyes, and the smile is the smile of a woman who woke up next to her mate and expected to find him still there. She reaches for me, her hand extending across the gap between the bed and the window, and the gesture is so naturally affectionate, so entirely without hesitation, that the crack in my heart widens another fraction.
I step back.
The smile falters.
I watch it happen in real time, the way her hand drops slightly, the way her brow draws together, the way the warmth in her eyes shifts into confusion and then something sharper and more defensive. I have seen that expression before. I saw it yesterday morning, when I overcompensated after waking up with her wrapped around me, when I pulled back and triedto rebuild the professional distance and she assumed I was repulsed by her.
I am not repulsed.
I am terrified.
I make my voice calm and deliberate and entirely devoid of the emotion currently threatening to compromise my ability to speak in complete sentences. "We need to discuss the logistical realities of our respective worlds."
She blinks at me.
"Logistical realities," she repeats, her voice flat.
"Yes."
"You're wearing your suit."
"Yes."
"At seven in the morning."
"Approximately seven-fifteen," I correct, and I hear how absurd it sounds the moment it leaves my mouth, but I do not know how else to create the distance I need to say what needs to be said. "I have been reviewing our circumstances."
