Page 41 of Orc’s Hex

ZIVA

Four minutes isn’t enough time and it’s exactly the amount of time we have, so I make it work.

Drazhul follows me to my chambers because the Blood Archive doesn’t have the privacy the marks require, and because Brynna is already moving on Isen’s errands and Varek is already at the east corridor and there isn’t a version of this where we do it separately. I need his arms bare from wrist to elbow. I need him still. Four minutes, start to finish, or the marks won’t set before we’re standing in front of a woman who’s been running Blood Law possession through his garrison.

He closes the door behind him.

The room is small compared to his—guest chambers, borrowed furniture, my kit spread across every surface because I stopped pretending this was temporary around day three. He takes up more of it than the room was built for. He always does. I’ve stopped being surprised by how that lands in my chest every single time and started just accounting for it, the way I account for anything that consistently affects my working focus.

“Sleeve,” I say, already reaching for the absorption medium.

He starts unbuttoning the cuff without hesitation, without the performance of modesty some clients bring to this—just efficient, unhurried economy, the same way he does everything that isn’t the curse. He pushes the sleeve to his elbow and holds his arm out, and I take his wrist in one hand to steady it and start mixing with the other.

“This will heat,” I say. “Same as before.”

“I know.”

I dip two fingers in the medium and trace the first line at his wrist, working toward the elbow in the geometry that redirects Blood Law aggression rather than absorbing it—this isn’t for me, it’s for him, so that when we’re standing in front of an active practitioner with three centuries of grievance behind her, whatever she throws at him glances instead of lands.

His skin is warm under my fingers. Warmer than it should be, and I know why—the Bondmark two feet away on my own wrist is answering something in him that has nothing to do with the absorption pattern I’m painting, and I make myself focus on the geometry instead of the warmth, because focus is the only thing standing between competent work and a mistake neither of us can afford right now.

He doesn’t say anything while I work.

I’ve learned to read his silences the way I read stone—this one isn’t the flat, managed quiet he uses in council, and it isn’t the controlled stillness he holds during a surge. This is a different kind of quiet. Watching.

I feel it before I look up. His eyes on my face, not my hands. He’s been watching me work, and the quality of that attention has stopped being professional somewhere in the last thirty seconds. The room is too small and four minutes are running out faster than either of us wants.

“You’re not watching what I’m doing,” I say. Not quite a question.

“I know what you’re doing.”

“Then you’re watching me do it.”

“Yes.”

No qualification. No deflection into something safer. I keep my eyes on the pattern, on the last line running from his forearm to the crease of his elbow, and I feel the heat under my fingers climb another degree that has nothing to do with the medium.

He’s not going to look away first. He never does.

I finish the line. My thumb stays at his pulse point a moment after the pattern’s set, because the pattern needs to set and because I’m not entirely sure I want to let go yet, and both of those things are true at the same time and I don’t examine which one is doing more work.

“Other arm,” I say.

He switches without a word, offering the second wrist the way he offered the first—open, unguarded, a man who has decided that whatever this costs him to allow, he’s going to allow it anyway. I start the second pattern. My hands are steadier than my pulse.

“Setha’s been in this hold eighteen months,” he says, low. Not really a question, more a thought he’s testing against me because I’m the only person in his life right now who tells him things without softening them. “I trusted her because I trusted Isen. I liked her.”

“I know.”

“I’m about to confront her for running possession through my garrison, and some part of me is still keeping a tally of the small kindnesses. The way she never complained about the cold in the lower archive. The way she remembered which of my advisors preferred tea over ale.” His jaw tightens, barely. “That part of me is going to have to be quiet for the next hour.”

I don’t stop working, but I look up at him.

“You’re allowed to grieve the version of her you thought you knew,” I say. “Grief and clarity aren’t opposites. You can hold both. I need you to hold both, actually—if you go in there only angry, you’ll miss what she’s not saying. If you go in there only sad, you won’t ask the questions that keep you and everyone in that hall alive.”

He is quiet a moment, and what crosses his face tells me he is sitting with the weight of it before he answers.

“You do this,” he says. “Hold contradictions like that. Like it costs you nothing.”