She looks at me. I don't explain. She unzips the bag, puts the books back on the hall table, and walks to the couch without a word. She doesn't ask why. Her silence is worse.
By two I've rearranged the garage shelving, restocked the pantry from the list on the fridge, and started a batch of soup from Maren's recipe card for minestrone. The card has a note in the margin in her handwriting:Double the garlic.The house fillswith the smell of it, warm and grounding, and for ten minutes I don't think about the library.
Then I reach for the burner and catch it again—the memory of Ellie's pussy gripping my fingers. I grip the counter and breathe through my nose and the memory hits me so hard my vision blurs.
Eight years since I've lost control. Eight years of morning routines and ledgers and Lily's school schedule and the deliberate, measured life I built around the hole Maren left. Last night I held a woman against a bookshelf and my hands shook.
I stir the soup. I don't call Ellie and I don't text her and I don't think about whether she's waiting for me to do either.
Bruiser finds me in the garage at four. I don't hear his truck pull up. He leans in the doorway with his arms crossed and a toothpick between his teeth.
"New guest at the Cove Hotel," he says. "Derek Frost. Checked in yesterday. Rented a car."
My hand stills on the toolbox lid.
"Ellie's ex." Bruiser shifts the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. "I know everything, brother."
He pushes off the doorframe and walks back toward the street. I stand in my garage holding a socket wrench with the name of a man I've never met lodged in my throat.
Lily asks Sunday morning if I'll take her to the library. Her holds came in and she's out of books, she asks with the careful tone she uses when she knows I'll say no but tries anyway. I say yes before I've thought about it, and I don't examine why.
I pull into the library lot and Lily unbuckles before I've cut the engine. I follow her inside and my eyes find Ellie at the circulation desk before I've crossed the threshold, the scenting pulling me to her like it has for months.
A man leans against the desk.
Tall, for a human. Dark hair styled in a way that takes effort and money. Pressed shirt, no wrinkles, the collar open. He stands with one elbow on the desk and his body angled toward Ellie, leaning into her space like he still has the right.
Ellie's face tells me everything. Her smile locked in place, the professional mask she keeps for patrons who argue about late fees. Her shoulders sit high and rigid. The smell rolling off her cuts through the library's baseline of old paper and lemon cleaner, sharp and acidic, the note I've learned means stress.
Lily stops three steps inside the door.
"That's your ex-husband." Lily doesn't bother keeping her voice down. "The one who left."
The man turns. He has to look up to meet my face, and whatever he expected to find in this library, it isn't me.
His composure cracks for half a second. A flinch around his left eye, the stiffening through his shoulders. Then he pulls it together, straightens, and extends a hand toward me with a smile that belongs in a conference room.
"You must be one of Ellie's neighbors."
I don't take his hand.
"I'm Lily's father," I say. "Ellie is my daughter's favorite person in the world."
The hand stays out for two more seconds. Then it drops.
"I'm her husband." Derek adjusts his collar.
"Ex-husband."
The correction lands quiet. I don't raise my voice. My orc scenting reads him in the same breath—cologne, expensive, layered over dry cleaning chemicals and hotel soap. And underneath: the sour, metallic edge of anxiety. He reeks of it. Not just the fear of standing across from a six-foot-five orc with tusks and scarred knuckles.
Derek looks at Ellie. Back at me. He doesn't leave. Derek looks at Ellie. Back at me. He doesn't leave.
"Look, I appreciate the... community support." The pause beforecommunityis deliberate. "But Ellie and I have things to discuss. Private things. Family things." He adjusts his collar again. "I've been reading about this town. About the club. And I have to be honest, I'm concerned about the people she's gotten involved with." His eyes flick to my tusks. He doesn't try to hide it. "She's in over her head. She just doesn't see it yet."
The words land in the library's silence.The people she's gotten involved with.The language of concern wrapped around something uglier. I've seen and heard it before—on flyers tucked under windshield wipers, in anonymous letters the club intercepts before they reach the diner or the bar.
My hands stay at my sides. Lily is ten feet away. Ellie is behind the desk and I stand where I am.
