Page 43 of My Orc Package Deal

“Resolved. Aggie signed off last night at eleven-fifteen. Subject line: Approve this so I can go to sleep. Four exclamation marks.”

Mr. Kowalski snorted.

“Interior inspection before the move?” I said.

Jocelyn flipped to the next page. “That’s the fun part.” She held her hands about eighteen inches apart. “There’s a hatch up top. More of a crawl space, really. No orc is getting through that.”

Brakkor, who had materialized at my shoulder, said nothing, but I didn’t think anyone needed orc senses to hear his low growl of disapproval.

“I could—” she started.

“No,” my twin brother stated firmly.

“Brak—”

“No. You don’t know how dangerous it could be, Kitten.”

“Nobody goes in there,” I said before this ate another fifteen minutes. Or before I had to listen to them coo at each other. “We move it intact, deal with the interior after. Nothing up there is structural anyway.”

Jocelyn pressed her lips together, but then sighed and nodded, turning to the foreman. “Korrad’s right, there’s probably no need to inspect it.”

The two of them bent over the plans, and I shifted back to my brother.

The excavator was sitting idle about twenty meters back, which explained Brakkor standing around glowering instead of working. A machine that size going quiet on a site day was either a small problem caught early or an expensive problem that wasn’t.

We couldn’t afford the excavator to misfire. So yesterday, Kowalski had pushed through the budget request for the service call without loving the timing. But if Brakkor said the machine needed Dravik, then we would pay Dravik.

Which explained why the male was now crouched at the engine housing with the panel off.

Heavily tattooed forearms. A set of shoulders hunched in a way that said he’d rather be left alone. Dravik had been the mine’s head mechanic back in Colorado; I’m not sure why he’d taken Abydos’s offer to move to Eastshore, but he’d already started a partnership with Cairo, who owned the autobody shop.

He wasn’t as surly as my twin, but he wasn’t exactly easy to converse with either. Still, I needed to know where we stood on the equipment front, and he could tell us.

So I hid my sigh and jerked my head to Brakkor, heading in that direction.

Dravik didn’t look up when we approached. He had a wrench in one hand and what looked like a filter housing in the other—not my area of expertise—and he was scowling at it.

“Well?” Brakkor said.

“Fuel filter’s shot. Secondary line’s probably gunked up.” Dravik set the housing down on the gravel. “Give me an hour.”

Brakkor grunted. “Great. I’m already an hour late.”

“You can have it fixed, or you can replace the whole fucking thing,” Dravik growled without looking up. “Quit complaining.”

I crouched down to see what I could see, which wasn’t much—and anything I did see wouldn’t make any sense to me. “Anything we need to order in?”

“Brought parts.” He jerked his chin toward a kit bag nearby. “Cairo keeps the basics.”

Good. One problem that wasn’t my problem.

I should have gone back to Kowalski. I had a crew showing up in twenty minutes expecting direction and a beam schedule to finalize before Thursday.

Instead I stayed crouched, watching Dravik work.

He was economical. Every movement had a reason, nothing wasted. There was a long scar that ran up his jaw and across his left eye socket. The explosion at the mine all those years ago had been…brutal. Not the kind of thing you walked away from without carrying some of it with you.

I’d never asked what happened to Dravik down there in the dark. Wasn’t my business.