Page 58 of Protective Pucking Orc

“Don’t wait for me,” I said. “I’m slow today.”

“I know. I watched you take that hit in the second period. You’re going to be purple tomorrow. Gorgeous, really. Very dramatic.” He rolled the ball down his spine with a grunt. “I’m going to get you a mirror so you can appreciate it.”

“Torrk.”

“You’ll thank me. You have excellent bruising. Some of us bruise like garbage and some of us are blessed⁠—”

“Torrk.”

He stopped. And here was the thing about Torrk that most people never bothered to learn, because they got tired somewhere around his third fart noise and stopped paying attention: he could turn it off. All of it. In an instant, like a light switch. When I arrived in the human world, the light switches were one of the first things that amazed me; imagine being able to turn the sun on and off so quickly!

But that was Torrk, once you bothered to get to know him.

He caught the lacrosse ball out of the air, set it down on the bench with only one bounce, and turned to face me with an expression I’d seen maybe four times in as many seasons.

Sober. Focused.

The face he wore in a shootout, when the arena went quiet and there was nothing left in the world but him and the shooter and the six feet of net he was sworn to defend.

“I heard her,” he said. “On the bus.”

Everything in me went still.

“Sofia,” he clarified, unnecessarily, gently. “I was sitting four rows in front of you with my hood up, and I wasn’t trying to listen, Dak, I swear it on the Torrk Method, but—” He tapped one pointed ear. “We hear what we hear.”

Fuck. Of course. Of course he had. I’d been so wrapped in her, in the smell of her fear and grief and the horror of what she’d told me, that I’d forgotten I sat in a metal tube full of males with hearing as sharp as my own.

I’d been careless. With her secrets, the most precious thing she’d ever handed me.

“Who else?” I asked. My voice came out flat and low, and I didn’t recognize it.

“Nobody,” he said it fast, firm, no hedging. “Jord had his buds in, blasting that noise he calls music. Bardon was up front with Coach. Kardok was asleep and drooling on the window like a kitling—I have photos, they’re disgusting.” His mouth twitched, then went still again. “It was just me, and it stays just me. I’d never—you know I’d never betray you. Her. Rosa.”

I did know. That was the thing. Beneath all the noise, Torrk was the most loyal male I’d ever stood beside on the ice. I let out a breath and sat down hard on the bench.

“So.” He lowered himself onto the bench across from me, elbows on his knees, and for once said nothing goofy. “None of our contacts have seen Anthony around town again since you beat the shit out of him. What are you going to do about him?”

And that—that was the question, wasn’t it?

“I don’t know,” I admitted, and the words tasted like rust.

Torrk waited. That was another thing nobody knew about him: he could wait. A goalie’s patience, endless and total.

“I hate it,” I said finally, quietly, to my own hands. “I hate that I’m just—sitting here. Waiting for him to come to us. Every day I go to practice and I stand at my own door before I leave it, listening to make sure they’re still inside, still breathing, still there. And every night I come home and they are, and I think—” I stopped. “I don’t chase him. I can’t. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know when he’s coming, so I just wait, and an orc is not built to wait while a threat walks free with his⁠—”

I stopped again.

“With his family,” Torrk finished, soft.

I didn’t correct him.

“And the worst part—” I dragged a hand down my face. “The worst part, Torrk, is that some traitor piece of me doesn’t want it to end. Because right now they’re in my house. Right now she makes my coffee and the kitling puts her drawings on my cold-box and calls me Dak, and I get to—I get to pretend. That it’s mine.” I dropped my hand and stared at the concrete floor of the locker room. “That they’re mine. That this is my life and not just some—some siege I’m waiting out.” I laughed, and it wasn’t a good sound. “What kind of male likes the danger because the danger is the only reason she’s under his roof?”

Torrk was quiet for a moment.

“Does she know?” he asked.

I looked up. “Know what?”