"Nothing. I'm going to think about this every time I shelve returns."
His mouth twitches.
I cover my face. "I'll never teach Dewey Decimal the same way."
He's quiet for a while. The rain picks up against the windows. I lie on the floor of my library with an orc's arm around me and I don't recognize my own life.
He turns on his side and presses his mouth to my forehead. Holds it there. "I'm tired of fighting this," he says against my skin."I don't want to fight it anymore."
"Then don't."
"Yeah." His mouth stays against my forehead. "I think I'm done."
We stay on the floor. He tells me about the monograph on Victorian property law and I tell him about the time I accidentally shelved an entire cart of returns in the wrong section and didn't notice for three days. He laughs, and the sound fills the empty library, I realize I've never heard him laugh like that. Open. Unguarded. We talk about Lily's project and the archive photographs and the fact that his daughter has been orchestrating this since September and neither of us stopped her.
The rain slows. The tapping on the skylight spaces out, then stops.
He stands first and reaches down and pulls me to my feet. My legs are stiff from the carpet and his hand stays on my waist until I'm steady.
We lock up together. He holds the door while I check the bolt twice, the way I always do, and we walk across the wet parking lot to my car. The air smells like rain and the tail end of a storm.
He opens my door. I stand in the gap between the car and him and he leans down and presses his lips to my forehead again, I close my eyes.
"Drive safe, sweet girl," he says.
"Goodnight, Colt."
He waits in the parking lot until my headlights hit the road.
I drive home at midnight. My skin smells like him, leather and that sharp edge underneath that isn't human, the same scent I caught the first time I met him.
I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and replay every second. His hand around my wrist, the fingers overlapping. My hand on his cock through his jeans, the size of him, whatbuilt differentlymeans when I'm already sore from two of his thick fingers. My face burns but my body still hums, I press my hand between my legs because I can still feel him there.
I'm done. Whatever this is, wherever it goes, there's no going back to Mr. Rivers and Miss Frost and Saturdays at four.
I close my eyes and I can still feel his mouth on my neck.
Chapter 6
Colt
Five a.m. and my coffee sits untouched on the kitchen table because I keep lifting the mug and setting it back down without drinking. The house ticks around me in the dark, the furnace cycling, rain tapping the gutters, Lily asleep down the hall, dead to the world the way only a twelve-year-old can be.
I can still smell Ellie on my hands.
Twelve hours since I left the library parking lot. I've showered, eaten, gone through the motions of a normal night. My hands are clean. My orc senses don't care, they locked onto her scent the moment I touched her and they won't let go, the same way they locked onto Maren's nineteen years ago in a lecture hall at Portland State, I carried that scent in my head for the rest of her life and for eight years after it ended.
Ellie pulled my glasses off. Both hands, careful, and she set them on the shelf behind her before she kissed me back. I held her against the stacks and her legs wrapped around my waist and the sound she made when I touched her—
The claiming instinct hit me in the library. Orc-deep, bone-level, a drive that doesn't negotiate.Claim. Mark. Mine.My tusks scraped her collarbone and every cell in my body screamed to bite down and make her mine permanently. The last time I let that instinct win, I gave Maren the claiming bite in our bedroom with candles she bought at the farmer's market and her laugh still in my ears. Years later I felt her heartbeat stop through the bond. I held her hand for twenty minutes after the nurses told me to let go because I could still feel the echo, fading, thinning, gone.
The coffee goes cold. I pour it down the drain and make a fresh pot.
Saturday unfolds the way I need it to: tasks with outcomes I can predict. Breakfast for Lily: scrambled eggs, toast, the orange juice she likes from the farm stand. She comes downstairs with her hair in a knot and the Butler tucked under one arm and eats without looking up from the page. I clean the kitchen. I open the club ledger and reconcile the reimbursements I've been putting off for a week. I cross-reference receipts, flag two duplicate entries, email Knox the updated numbers. The columns balance.
At ten o'clock Lily packs her backpack. Library books, notebook, the pencil case she keeps in the front pocket. She stands by the door with the bag over one shoulder and waits.
"Not today, Lil."
