Page 65 of The Orc's Protection
“Vraag—” My name is half plea, half prayer.
“I have you.” I keep my touch light—circling, coaxing—while I move inside her, and feel the moment her body stops arguing and gives in. “That’s it. Take it.”
She comes again with a sound that I will hear in my bones for the rest of my life. And this time I follow her over.
I thrust deep and hold, buried completely, and let go of everything—eight years of restraint, eight years of makingmyself smaller, eight years of careful distance—all of it obliterated in the space of a single moment. I spill inside her, shaking, my face pressed to her throat, her name the only coherent thing left in my head.
For a long time, neither of us moves.
I become aware of the room gradually. The quiet. Her heartbeat slowing against my chest. The warmth of her skin under my hands.
I shift carefully, keeping her close, and feel her exhale—long and soft and utterly satisfied. She tucks her face against my throat and her fingers curl into my chest, and I understand without words that she is not going anywhere.
“Still with me?” I ask softly.
She smiles against my skin. “Right here.”
A long moment passes. Her breathing evens. Her fingers stay curled against my chest.
“Vraag.”
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
I go still beneath her hands. The words land the way true things do, not as surprise, but as recognition. As if some part of me hasbeen waiting for them to be spoken aloud, and can now finally set down the waiting.
“I love you,” I say. “I have chosen you. I will continue choosing you, in all the ways that matter.”
She exhales, soft and complete.
“That’s exactly how I hoped you’d say it.”
“It is the only way I would.”
The certainty in it settles into me like something coming home. This was not hunger. Not impulse. Not a moment seized in the dark. This was a choice made in full light, carried through with trust, and met with everything I am.
I press a kiss to her hair and hold her close, already knowing that whatever comes next—the world outside, the work ahead, the life we’re building—I am ready for all of it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Riona
The week that followed our first joining was not quiet. There was fallout from the security breach, and endless gossip about Vraag’s resignation that turned out not to be a retreat but an advance—a reframing, a declaration, and the first move in building something entirely on his own terms.
There was Janet asking questions I didn’t answer, and Principal Winters watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read, and an entire classroom of five-year-olds who somehow sensed that their teacher was operating at a frequency slightly above normal and responded by being both exhausting and unexpectedly sweet about it.
There was Kendra, who took one look at my face on Tuesday and said absolutely nothing—just handed me a glass of wine and waited, which is the most eloquent thing she has ever done.
And through all of it, there was Vraag. Steady. Present. No longer performing a smaller version of himself for anyone’s comfort.
That’s what I keep noticing. Not that he’s gotten bigger—he was always this size. It’s that he’s stopped apologizing for it. The careful compression I watched him perform in those first weeks—shoulders drawn in, voice turned down, presence dialed back to whatever wattage he’d calculated wouldn’t alarm anyone—is gone. What’s underneath isn’t intimidating. It’s just him. And somewhere between the coat and the coffee shop and everything that came after, I fell in love with the male who’d been quietly, stubbornly there the whole time.
And now, only days after we pledged ourselves to each other in the dark and the stillness of his apartment, we’re standing in a firelit circle with perhaps a hundred witnesses and an elder who apparently knew this was coming long before either of us did.
The gathered circle quiets as Elder Korgath steps forward.
The fire at the center burns low and steady, its heat a living presence against the cold air. Breath fogs and fades. Boots shift once, then still. This is not a celebration. It’s something older. Intentional.
