Page 50 of My Orc Package Deal

I knew what I’d see. The anger. Or worse—that careful blankness that meant he was containing something. I’d brought this here. I’d married him with this following me, carried it right through his front door, and⁠—

“This is my wife’s debt?” Korrad asked.

“That’s correct.”

“Then yes.” He snapped the folder shut. “The debt is mine now.”

He turned to me, and there was no calculation on his face. No blankness. He just looked at me the way he always looked at me, and I wanted to cry. Wanted to make him yell at me, wanted him to tell me he was disappointed in me. Wanted him to say something to shame me.

Instead, he gently set me away from him, his hold not leaving my waist until he was sure I could stand on my own.

“Go get the boys,” he said gently. “Send them out to the car.”

“Korrad.” My voice came out wrong—too thin, too high. “You can’t just take this on, this is my⁠—”

When he pressed his lips to my forehead, my voice cracked.

I cracked.

“I’m going to take the boys to Brak’s,” he said softly, “and then Mr. Smalls and I are going to the bank to discuss repayment. It’ll be okay, Kesha.”

He turned back to our unwanted guest, dish towel still over his shoulder, like this was just something that needed doing on a Friday afternoon.

I didn’t see how any of this could possibly be okay.

I stood in the hallway, holding up the wall, as my whole world filed past me. Both boys kissed me goodbye, and I was grateful they were both too excited to see how badly I was shaken.

The door clicked shut behind me.

I stood in the front hall and listened to them: the boys’ voices going down the front path, the sound of Korrad’s truck door, Richard Smalls’s sedan backing out onto the road.

Quieter. Quieter. Gone.

I had about forty-five seconds of trying to hold it together before I stopped trying.

The couch was right there. I made it.

And then I pressed my face into the cushion and let everything I’d been swallowing for the last twenty minutes come up at once—all the terror and the shame and the sick, free-falling certainty that I had just watched everything good in my life load into a truck and drive away.

You knew.

I’d known. That was the worst part. I’d known I was at fault here, I was the bad guy.

But I’d never let myself look at that fact directly, because looking at it directly meant acknowledging what I’d done, and acknowledging what I’d done meant acknowledging that I’d walked into this marriage with a secret.

Acknowledging that I’d let Korrad think he was getting a partner and handed him a liability instead.

Steal, Smalls had said.

I hadn’t stolen anything. I had borrowed, legally, with paperwork and interest rates that should’ve been criminal. I had borrowed because I’d had to, because there was no other option, because⁠—

It didn’t matter. The word was in my head now, and it wasn’t leaving.

Steal.

Maybe the happiness was what I’d stolen. Hadn’t I known, somewhere underneath the careful not-looking, that this was coming? These last weeks—the beach, the drum lessons, the late nights in the kitchen, Jay saying thanks, Mom over lunch so easily—all of it borrowed against a debt I’d been hoping geography would make disappear.

Two months of real.