He catches me staring.
I look at the ceiling. Very interesting ceiling. Lots of stalactites.
"Twenty minutes," Grimshaw announces through a mouthful of pins.
Twenty minutes of sitting on a crate in an underground monster market trying not to catalog the exact width of an orc's shoulders. Fine. I pull out my phone. Fourteen missed calls from my mother. Twenty-two texts from my sister Petunia, each one progressively more unhinged in its use of exclamation points. One text from my cousin Beau that just says:Heard you're bringing someone. Craig's here already. Just FYI.
Craig.
My stomach drops three floors.
Craig is already at the Silverleaf Country Club. Craig, who proposed to me on my twenty-eighth birthday and then un-proposed six weeks later because he'd been sleeping with a CrossFit instructor named Jade. Craig, who my mother still refers to as "the one that got away" despite the fact that he got away directly into another woman's bed. Craig, who will be at my sister's wedding because he went to college with the groom and the universe is a vindictive creature with a personal grudge against Magnolia Jenkins.
My fingers tighten around the phone.
"Problem?" Dash rumbles from the fitting platform.
"No."
"Your jaw is clenched hard enough to crack a walnut."
"I have a very strong jaw."
He doesn't push it. Points to Grimshaw go back to stitching.
I shove the phone into my purse. Craig doesn't matter. That's the whole point. I hired six feet and nine inches of scarred, tusked, weapon-carrying orc mercenary to make Craig not matter. To make all of them not matter. My mother's sighing. Petunia's pity. Aunt Delphine's yearly interrogation about my "timeline." None of it touches me this weekend. Not with Dash standing next to me, an immovable wall between me and every person who's ever looked at me and seen something incomplete.
"Done." Grimshaw bites through the final thread and hops down from his platform. "Mirror's behind the curtain."
Dash rolls his shoulders once. The jacket settles. He steps down from the fitting platform and walks toward the full-length mirror in the alcove, pulling back the velvet curtain with one hand.
He stops.
I stand up from my crate.
The armor-silk has done something impossible. It has taken this battle-scarred, broken-tusked, weapon-hoarding mercenary and turned him into the most devastating thing I have ever seen in formalwear.
The jacket sits flush across his shoulders, tapering down to his waist in a clean, ruthless line. The silk is so black it eats light. It moves when he moves, fluid and alive in a way that is no longer aggressive but elegant. Predatory, even. The collar frames his jaw, his broken tusk, the hard angle of his cheekbone. The trousers break perfectly over boots that Grimshaw has somehow incorporated into the design, hiding the steel toe caps under a polished leather overlay.
He looks like he could walk into a five-star restaurant and buy it.
He looks like he could walk into a country club and burn it to the ground.
He adjusts his cuff. The silk ripples, accommodating. He turns slightly, examining the side profile, and the jacket pulls across his back in a way that makes something behind my ribs do a very inconvenient somersault.
"The silk fits well," he says. Clinical. Professional. As if he's evaluating the weight distribution of a new breastplate.
Grimshaw crosses his arms and beams up at his creation.
"It acceptedher," the kobold mutters again, quiet enough that maybe I'm not supposed to hear.
Dash's eyes find mine in the mirror.
"Will this suffice for the mission parameters?"
My mouth is dry. "Yeah. That'll work."
The mirror throws his reflection back at me and my lungs simply quit. Not a dramatic gasp. Not a flutter. A full system shutdown, like my body has decided oxygen is optional in the presence of whatever this is.
