The orc’s expression shifts. Just a fraction. Just enough for me to see that I’ve surprised him.
“The forest will take you,” he says. “Whether you fight or surrender. Whether you kill me or I kill you. Briargrave is patient.”
My jaw tightens. “I came here for money.”
“No.” He steps closer still. Close enough that I can smell him—earth and sap and a darker note beneath, one that makes my pulse kick in a way I don’t want to examine. “You came here because someone you loved walked into this forest and never came back. You came here for revenge.”
The words hit like a blade between my ribs.
Cyrilla. How does he know about Cyrilla?
“The forest remembers everything.” As if he heard the question I didn’t ask. “Every heartbeat. Every footstep. Every drop of blood that falls. Your grief bleeds off you like heat. The forest tasted it the moment you crossed the boundary.”
My hands want to shake. I force them still.
“Then the forest knows I’m not leaving,” I say. “Not until I finish what I came here to do.”
Silence. The thorns rustle. The roots stir. The orc stands before me like a statue, scarred and terrible and somehow, impossibly, striking in the way that violence is striking when it’s done without hesitation.
Then the roots around me withdraw.
Not all of them—not enough for me to escape, if escaping were even possible. But enough to give me room to breathe. Enough to signal that, for the moment, I’m not about to die.
“The Consortium sends more hunters,” the orc says. “A larger group. They entered the forest two days ago. They’re burning a path toward the heart of Briargrave.”
I blink. “The Consortium?—”
“They followed you.” His voice is flat. Cold. “You led them here. Whether you knew it or not.”
Damn. The backup team. The one I knew they’d send, because the contract was too valuable to trust to a single hunter. They must have been tracking me since before I entered the forest. Using me as a pathfinder.
“How many?” My voice comes out steady despite the ice spreading through my chest.
“Many. Enough to cause trouble.” The orc turns, presenting his back to me—a gesture of either supreme confidence or profound indifference to whether I try to kill him. “Enough to wake what should stay sleeping.”
“What exactly?”
He stops. Doesn’t turn around.
“An entity that will kill us both. One the forest has been containing for eight hundred years.” A pause. The glow of his eyes is visible even in profile. “One that wants to be free.”
He starts walking again. The thornpaths open before him, close behind him, swallowing him back into the shadows.
“Wait.” I move forward, stop when thorns press against my chest, warning me back. “What am I supposed to do?”
His voice drifts back through the trees, already fading:
“Survive. If you can.”
Then he’s gone.
The roots around me withdraw fully. The thorns pull back. The path ahead opens—not back toward the treeline, but deeperinto the forest. Toward the darkness. Toward whatever the orc is trying to stop.
I could turn around. Find my way out. Abandon the contract, the money, the revenge.
But Cyrilla walked into this forest five years ago. She walked in and she never came back, and I’ve spent every day since then wondering what killed her. Wondering if I could have stopped it.
Now I know. The orc. The warden. The monster who controls the forest that swallowed the only person I ever loved.
