Page 54 of The Orc's Protection
The answer arrives before I can redirect it.
“Everything,” I say.
She steps forward and places her hand on my forearm. Just that. No urgency in it, no dramatic press of need. Just her palm, warm and deliberate, resting on my sleeve in the late afternoon light, with the parking lot emptying around us and nobody left to notice or not notice.
I cover her hand with mine.
“We’re okay?” she asks.
“We’re okay,” I say.
She leaves first. I watch her walk to her car, her posture settling back into that particular ease she carries when something has been resolved. The evidence was already there. What she’d done in that hallway with Principal Winters. What it cost her, and that she’d paid it without hesitation.
But knowing and feeling are not the same thing, and somewhere between this morning and this moment something has shifted from my head into my chest—settled there, solid and permanent, the way conviction does when it finally stops being an argument you’re making to yourself and becomes simply a truth you know. I’ve learned to recognize it. It looks like relief that didn’t need to become something larger.
There is something else I haven’t examined directly. A sound that escapes me when she is close: low and involuntary. The first time it happened, I caught it almost immediately and locked it back. The second time I didn’t catch it in time, and she felt it against her palms, and the look on her face was not alarm. It was something closer to recognition. Since then, I have stopped trying to contain it. I am not certain I could.
In StoneWatch, a warrior’s purr is not a thing that can be performed or decided. It is the body’s answer to safety. To belonging. The fact that it happens with her, that it has been happening for some time, and that she does not flinch, and that I no longer want her to, is perhaps the most honest thing I’ve told her without speaking a word.
The gate lock holds when I check it a third time. The perimeter is secure. Everything is exactly as it should be.
Tomorrow is the Harvest Festival. The school will be loud and crowded and full of variables I can’t fully control.
I am not worried about it.
Chapter Nineteen
Vraag
The school’s Harvest Festival buzzes with activity—classrooms transformed into themed stations, children carrying bags of goodies they’ve won from carnival games racing from door to door, parents crowding hallways with smartphones raised. The chaos creates too many security variables for comfort.
I position myself near the east entrance with clear sightlines to the kindergarten wing.
Someone tried to access that room. More than once.
The earlier attempts remain unresolved. I don’t yet know whether the focus was opportunistic or deliberate, whether the interest was in the location itself or the routines surrounding it.What I know is this: the pattern is not random, and the risk is not theoretical.
And the question I have not yet been able to answer—the one that has been sitting at the back of every perimeter check and every security report I’ve filed—is whether it is the classroom they keep returning to, or the person in it. Whether Riona Walker is incidental to this threat or the point of it. I have no evidence that confirms the second possibility. I also have no evidence that rules it out. In StoneWatch training, the absence of evidence is not reassurance. It is simply an open question that hasn’t been answered yet. I don’t like open questions.
StoneWatch training forbids assumptions. You observe. You document. You wait for facts.
And so I do.
I adjust protocols within approved limits. I stay visible. Restraint does not mean inattention.
The carnival atmosphere doesn’t diminish my vigilance. If anything, the crowded corridors and distracted staff heighten my awareness. The mystery figure from the security footage chose their targets strategically. Tonight provides optimal cover.
Grulk appears beside me, colored streamers draped over his maintenance uniform. His expression is sober, his gaze already tracking the movement in the hallway.
“Big crowd,” he says quietly. “Harder to spot what doesn’t belong.”
“It is,” I agree, continuing my scan of the corridor.
“If someone were testing access points, this kind of event would be a good time to try again.”
“That is my assessment as well.”
He nods once, satisfied. “Just here to remind you that I adjusted the east camera angle as you requested,” Grulk continues, lowering his voice. “Full coverage of both the window and the A/V room access point. No blind spots now.”
