Page 44 of The Orc's Protection
As I watch her walk away, the threat remains unresolved. The system is still slow. The danger is still undefined.
But something essential has shifted.
She knows.
And we are aligned.
Whatever comes next, it will not be faced in silence.
Chapter Fifteen
Riona
My phone rings as I’m pulling into Vraag’s parking lot. Kendra.
I silence it, then feel immediately guilty and send a text,I’m fine. Better than fine. I’ll call you this weekend and tell you everything.
She sends a text approximately four seconds later.I KNEW IT. You’re with him now, amiright?
I’m still smiling as I grab the takeout bags from the passenger seat.
Three days ago, I drove home from that coffee shop the long way, not because I wanted to but because I wasn’t ready to be inside yet, where it was quiet and ordinary and the footagewould have to settle into something real. Someone had watched my classroom. Stood at my window in the dark and tested the lock. Not random. Not a mistake. Somebody thought about it first—thought about my room, my window, my routines—and then drove there. And came back. And was still planning to come again.
I’d meant what I said in the coffee shop about not panicking. And I hadn’t. But there’s a difference between not panicking and not being affected. Driving home, I’d felt the difference clearly—in the extra check of my mirrors, in the way I’d scanned the parking lot before I got out of my car, in the fact that I’d turned the deadbolt and stood there for a moment just listening to my apartment be quiet. Not fear exactly. Just a new awareness of all the ordinary darkness I’d never thought twice about before.
What I kept coming back to wasn’t the footage. It was that Vraag had seen it, understood what it meant, and told me the truth about it anyway. He hadn’t minimized it to spare me. Hadn’t made a decision for me about what I could handle. Just sat across a coffee shop table and handed me something difficult because I deserved to have it.
My father used to make decisions for my mother the same way he breathed—automatically, without consultation, because it simply didn’t occur to him that she might want to be asked. He called it taking care of her. She called it the same thing, right up until she didn’t have anything left that was hers to take care of. I was seventeen the year I understood that those two things—being cared for and being consulted—were not the same thing. That you could have one without the other. That having only the first one was its own kind of slow erasure.
Vraag asked; he consulted. That mattered more than I expected it to.
Tonight feels like the other side of that. Like the exhale after a held breath. Six weeks since we met, and somewhere between the security footage and the coffee shop and everything that happened after, the pretense of this being anything casual has quietly dissolved. Tonight, there’s no work excuse and no reason to leave early.
The door swings open, and my heart does that ridiculous leap again. Vraag fills the doorframe completely, dressed in simple dark pants and an emerald Henley that stretches across his broad chest. I like this casual side of him.
“You came,” he says, as if he’d doubted I would.
“I brought Thai,” I respond, holding up the bags. “I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I got… well, basically everything on the menu.”
A hint of a smile touches his lips. “Appropriate calculation for orc metabolism.”
He eases the bags out of my grip and steps back, gesturing me inside. The apartment is surprisingly spacious, with high ceilings that accommodate his height, and minimalist furnishings that somehow still convey warmth. What draws my eye immediately are the walls—covered with intricate sketches and paintings of rugged landscapes unlike any I’ve seen on Earth. Steep cliffs and twisting valleys, forests with impossible trees, skies streaked with multiple moons.
“Did you draw and paint all of these?” I ask as he sets the food on the kitchen counter. I examine a particularly detailed mountain range he’s painted about the small kitchen table.
“Yes.” He sounds almost embarrassed. “Started as therapy, but… took on a life of its own.”
He shrugs it off, but this male has talent. I approach one showing a massive structure built into a mountainside, the same scene I remember from his sketchbook, but transformed. At pocket size, in pencil, it had been precise and moving. At this scale, with color, it’s something else entirely.
The stone catches light. The proportions become genuinely monumental.
“I didn’t understand how big it was,” I say. “From the sketch.”
“Scale is difficult to convey in a small format,” he says, standing close behind me. “I know what it should feel like. The page was never large enough to hold it.”
“It certainly works at this size.”
He makes a dismissive sound. “Functional documentation, nothing more.”
