Page 5 of Orc'd & Loaded
My hands move before my brain catches up.
"Is fine! Is FINE!" I lunge for the bar towel hanging from my apron string. Rough cotton, stained brown from a thousand wipedowns, smelling faintly of the iron polish I use on the smoker grates. "Borog fixes! Borog is expert at stain removal!"
I close the distance in one stride. My hand lands on her shoulder, and the towel hits the sauce on her, and I scrub.
Hard.
The sauce does not come off. The sauce spreads. A mahogany bloom across white cotton, widening like a bruise under my palm. The rough weave of the towel catches the fabric and drags it sideways, pulling one button loose and smearing a fresh trail of brown from her sternum to her clavicle.
"Hold still, small chef, this is -- the grain, you must go with the grain of the --"
I scrub harder. The stain gets worse. My hand moves to her sleeve, where a splatter pattern has landed in a constellation, and the towel leaves a greasy streak that turns the white fabric translucent. Through it, pale skin. A freckle.
I yank the towel away.
"Perhaps Borog uses other side."
I flip the towel. The other side is worse. Darker. I press it against the largest stain below her collar and apply pressure, leaning in, and the motion brings me the clipboard she holds between us. The clipboard bends. My shadow swallows her entirely. The top of her skull comes to the middle of my torso, and I can see the precise line where her hair is parted, not a single strand out of place despite the carnage below her neck.
"Just -- if you hold very still, the fibers will absorb the --"
The sauce is now on my towel, her coat, my apron, her clipboard, my forearm, her ear, and somehow her left shoe.
I dab at the shoe.
Her body goes rigid. Every muscle. Simultaneously. Like someone has run a current through her from the floor up. The clipboard in her hands vibrates with a frequency that seems medically concerning.
Her eyes find mine.
They are the pale green of an unripe pear, and right now they contain a violence so pure and so concentrated that my grandmother, who fought in two clan wars and once bit through a shield, would have taken a respectful step backward.
"Remove."
One word. Barely a whisper.
"Borog is almost --"
"Remove. Your. Hand."
The clipboard hits my sternum. Adetonation. Both her palms on the board, arms locked, and the force that comes through them has no right existing inside a body that size. My boots skid on the sawdust. I stumble back two steps. Three. My hip catches the smoker, and the iron barrel rocks on its base, and a fresh wave of heat rolls across my back.
She advances into the space I've vacated.
"You." Sauce drips from her chin. "Have made it. Worse."
"Borog was helping --"
"You werenothelping. You were grinding rendered animal fat into a four-hundred-euro Bragard chef coat with what appears to be a rag you use to clean yourgrill."
She holds the coat away from her body with two fingers, and the look on her face is the look of someone watching a beloved pet walk into traffic.
"The sauce, it will wash --"
"It will NOT wash out. This is molasses-based. I cansmellthe sugar content. This is now a chemical bond at the molecular level. This coat isdead."
She releases the fabric. It falls back against her body with a wet sound.
Her jaw works. The muscles in her neck stand out like bridge cables. A single thick drop of sauce falls from her earlobe, the one I somehow got, and lands on her shoulder with a tiny, precise plop.
