Page 10 of Orc’s Hex

“The curse activates in proportion to depth of attachment. The closer you get to someone—not just physically—the louder the hallucination and the more aggressive the response.”

“That matches what I’ve observed.”

He stands with this. He’s known the shape of it for a long time. Hearing it named out loud by someone who arrived at it through evidence rather than a century of living it lands differently.

“The chest sigil is a channel,” she continues. “Your ancestral marking is how whatever is in the foundation operates through you. It reaches up through the bloodline and runs everything it runs. The betrothals. The guard captain. The advisor.” She holds his gaze. “It’s not external to you, Drazhul. It’s been using you as the mechanism.”

She waits. Doesn’t soften it, doesn’t elaborate, doesn’t look away.

He’s spent a century believing at some level that the violence was his. That the curse and his nature were too close together to separate. Standing here listening to her tell him flatly that the violence belongs to whatever built that mechanism—that he’s been weaponized against himself, not broken—is a thing he will need to sit with later, in private, where no one can see what it does to his face.

“What do you need next.”

She looks at him for one beat longer than the question requires. Then—“The Blood Archive. The Hall of Oaths—I need to finish reading the floor. And eventually the Foundation Crypt. But not until I know what I’m walking into.”

“I’ll open the Archive. Some shelves require my blood—I’ll be there.”

“Fine.”

“There’s a fortress archivist. Isen Crow. He’s been sitting on this problem for years, waiting for someone to ask the questions he’s already half-answered. He’ll be—“ Drazhul considers the word. “Enthusiastic.”

The corner of her mouth moves. Almost nothing. Almost.

“I’ll want to speak to him.”

“He’ll want to speak to you considerably more.”

They walk back toward the main corridor. He doesn’t note that the distance between them has closed from the walk down—half a step, his shoulder almost at her eyeline—or that neither of them has moved to correct it.

Near dark he’s in his chambers when the chest sigil burns.

Not the familiar dull pressure of it. Burns—heat through the inscription channels, the rune glowing through his shirt in a color that has no adequate name. He pulls his collar open and looks at it in the firelight.

Bright. Active. Reactive in a way it hasn’t been in years.

The curse knows she touched it. It knows she read it. It is answering.

He stands at the window with his hand over his own chest—over the inscription that channels three centuries of someone else’s decision through his body—and he thinks about Ziva Stark pressing her palm to the same place this morning with the certainty of someone reading him in a language he didn’t know she spoke.

He thinks about her breath and the smell of her in this cold place, and the fact that when his hand lifted he stopped it.

He always stops it. That has never once felt like an achievement until today.

The glow fades. Slow. Almost reluctant.

He watches it go.

He does not go to bed.

He sits in the chair by the fire with a century of practice at sitting still and lets himself do the thing he has spent most of that century refusing to do with anyone: turn a person over in his mind without immediately calculating the risk they represent.

He’s had that thought a dozen times since morning and it hasn’t worn down yet. People move. It’s the correct response, the sane response, the response every guard captain and senior advisor and betrothed woman he has ever stood too close to has eventually had—some sooner, some later, but always, eventually, the body doing what the body is built to do when it’s near something that might hurt it. He has never once resented them for it. He built his entire life around expecting it.

She put her hand on his jaw to angle it toward the firelight and when the room went wrong around both of them, she didn’t go for the blade at her hip and she didn’t try to break his grip. She held his wrist like a woman finding a pulse and told him to look at her.

He is still turning that over three hours later.

The fire burns down to embers he doesn’t feed. Somewhere in the hold Garrok is finishing the evening watch rotation, and the sound of it—distant, ordinary, iron and boots on stone—is the only thing marking that time is still passing normally for everyone who isn’t him.