"No one walks away, Roark," Grimjaw rumbles, rolling his massive shoulders. "You die in the guild, or you die in the dirt."
He lunges before the echoes of his voice fade. Despite his size, he moves with terrifying speed. His fist connects with my bad shoulder, and white-hot pain arcs down my spine as my newly reduced joint screams in protest. I stagger back, tasting green blood, but duck under his follow-up hook and drive my good shoulder into his midsection. Hitting him feels like tackling a bank vault, but it forces him back a step.
The fight strips down to primal math: bone against bone, momentum against mass. Grimjaw fights with decades of ruthless experience, targeting every fresh wound the rock crawler left me. He lands a knee to my cracked ribs that drives the breath from my lungs, sending me down hard on the granite.
Grimjaw steps back, his eyes narrowing. "You're weak, Roark," he spits, signaling to his second-in-command. The Orc tosses Grimjaw a massive broadsword. A murmur ripples through the mercenaries—a blatant violation of the bare-hands rite—but no one intervenes. Grimjaw raises the blade high, ready to cleave me in two.
But as my vision swims, I catch a flash of midnight blue beyond the mercenary ring. The van.Sugar & Slag.
I am not dying in the dirt. I have a delivery route on Monday.
I roll to my feet just as the blade comes down. I catch the flat of the broadsword between my bare palms, the sheer force driving me back to my knees. The metal groans. With a roar that tears my throat, I twist my entire body, using the leverage of my stance and every ounce of remaining Orcish strength. The broadsword snaps in two with a sound like a gunshot.
The sudden release of tension throws Grimjaw off balance. Before he can recover, I sweep his planted leg and drive him ontohis back. I snatch the broken half of his own blade and press the jagged edge against his throat, pinning him to the blood-slicked stone. My lungs burn with every breath. Grimjaw looks up at me, chest heaving, and sees exactly what the rock crawler saw. A man who has something to go home to.
"You yield?" I ask, my voice echoing off the canyon walls.
Grimjaw stares at the broken blade, then drops his head back against the granite. "I yield," the old Orc rumbles, spitting a tooth onto the stone. "The contract is broken. You are free."
I toss the shattered steel aside and rise. The mercenaries ringing the stone circle part in stunned, absolute silence. I turn my back on them, walk to the waiting bakery van parked at the edge of the camp, and climb into the passenger seat. Magnolia puts the van in drive.
"Told you," she says, wiping a smudge of dirt from my jaw.
"You start Monday."
MAGNOLIA
TWO YEARS LATER
The bell above the door hasn't stopped ringing since six a.m.
Saturday morning at Sugar & Slag Bakery looks like a beautiful war zone. Three industrial mixers running at full speed. Two apprentice bakers elbow-deep in Swiss meringue buttercream. A shelf of cooling racks stacked six high with golden brown croissants that sell out before noon every single weekend without exception.
I pipe the last rosette onto a birthday cake shaped like a centaur and wipe my forehead with the back of my wrist. Flour in my hair. Buttercream on my collarbone. Chocolate under my fingernails.
Perfect.
The bakery takes up three full storefronts now. The original tiny shop on the left, the expanded production kitchen in the center where the old potion supply store used to be, and the brand new café space on the right with floor-to-ceiling windows and mismatched vintage chairs I found at an estate sale in the Fae Quarter. The sign outside is hand-painted in gold leaf. The Yelp reviews are disgusting. Four point nine stars and theonly reason it's not five is because some guy named Derek complained that the scones were "too flaky." Derek can rot.
"Boss! The Thornberry order is ready to load!"
That's June, my morning shift lead. Pixie-cut, nose ring, can ice forty cupcakes in twelve minutes flat. I stole her from a French patisserie downtown and I will never give her back.
"Tell Dash it's the fragile load protocol. Ten tiers. Enchanted sugar flowers. If one petal cracks, the bride will literally hex us."
"He already knows. He finished his 'route reconnaissance' and just pulled the van around to the end of the block.'"
Of course he has.
I push through the kitchen's swinging door and step into the bright morning chaos of Birch Street. The Saturday farmer's market crowds pack the sidewalks shoulder to shoulder. Strollers, dogs, a wood nymph selling artisanal honey, a dwarf arguing with a parking meter.
And there, stepping out of the bakery to carry the order down to our brand new bakery van double-parked at the end of the block — midnight blue, custom suspension, reinforced steel shelving in the back, and the words SUGAR & SLAG painted in elegant cream script across the side — is six feet nine inches of dark green, heavily scarred, deeply focused Orc.
Dash wears his delivery uniform. Black work pants. Fitted black henley with the sleeves pushed up over his massive forearms. Steel-toed boots. The company logo embroidered small over his heart. An earpiece in one pointed ear connected to absolutely nothing because he just likes the tactical aesthetic.
He lifts the ten-tier cake off a rolling prep cart like it's made of sleeping newborns.
Both hands spread wide beneath the reinforced base board. Fingers splayed, every tendon in his forearms standing at attention.
