Page 28 of Orc’s Hex

Not because it’s soft. Because it’s always happening—whatever is going on behind his eyes, it’s present and current and when his attention is aimed at you, you feel it.

“You said you know what you’re choosing,” he says. “Staying.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been in this hold five days.”

“I know what a Betrayal Sigil at full activation looks like. I know what the escalation curve is.” I look at him. “I also know what a job looks like when you walk away from it before it’s done.”

“That’s the professional answer.”

“It’s the true one.”

His chin drops a fraction. That’s all.

“The personal answer.” Not a question. A pressure—his silences do that, ask without asking, and make it very difficult to not answer.

I let the wind do the work for a moment.

“The personal answer is that the sigil is afraid of me. And I’d like to finish the job.”

We’re standing at the same parapet. The space between us is the width of a forearm. The wind is pressing my hair back from my face and his eyes are on mine and they have stopped pretending to be anything other than what they are.

He’s quiet long enough that I think he’s going to let it stand there, professional answer laid over personal answer laid over whatever’s underneath both of them. He doesn’t.

“Where did you train.”

It’s not the question I’m braced for. I’d expected him to press on the sigil, on what being read by three-hundred-year-old Blood Law vengeance magic actually feels like from the inside. He’s not asking about the job.

“Southlands, mostly. A curse-eater in the Thornwood took me on when I was twelve.” I keep my voice even, the way I keep it for everything, and notice for the first time in a long while that even isn’t quite landing the way it usually does. “I apprenticed eight years. Went independent at twenty.”

“Family.”

“None that would notice if I didn’t come back from this job.” I say it flatly, the way I’ve said it to exactly no one in ten years, because there was never anyone worth saying it to. “That’s not a tragedy. It’s a fact I stopped assigning weight to a long time ago.”

“I don’t believe you’ve stopped.”

“You don’t know me well enough to have an opinion about that.”

“I’ve known you five days,” he says, “and I’ve watched you catalog every threat in this hold with the same attention you catalog every kindness—Isen’s enthusiasm, Brynna’s bowls of soup she pretends aren’t for you, Garrok’s terrible jokes. You don’t stop assigning weight to things. You just do it quietly enough that most people don’t notice.”

I don’t have an answer for that immediately, which is rare enough that I feel the absence of one.

“Why does it matter where I trained,” I say instead, deflecting because deflecting is a skill I’m considerably better at than this.

“Because you’re in my hold, doing work that could kill you, for people who have made your life harder every day you’ve been here—Brakka, the assembly, half my senior council—and you haven’t once asked what happens to you if this goes wrong. I want to know if that’s professional discipline or if it’s because there’s no one waiting to ask the question for you.”

He’s not making conversation. He’s gathering information the way he gathers everything—because I matter to the mechanism in his foundation now, and he’s catching up to what the mechanism already decided.

“Both,” I say. It’s the most honest answer I have. “It started as discipline. Ten years alone teaches you not to need anyone waiting. I’m not sure anymore which one is doing the work.”

He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his face—not soft, nothing about this man is soft—settles into a decision I can see him making in real time.

“There’s someone now,” he says. “Asking.”

I don’t trust my voice for a second, so I don’t use it.

“That’s not nothing,” I finally say.