Page 62 of Orc’s Hex

He knows this because he knows her.

She assesses—not calculates. He has spent these days learning the difference. The false version calculates. The real one reads and decides and moves. He knows the difference between her decision rhythm and the thing the curse is showing him.

The curse cycles through her betraying him—ten different versions, each one arriving at a different angle. It cycles through his own history: the four betrothals, each reconstructed in full with the horror of watching himself hurt people who trusted him. Every betrayal he has ever caused laid out in detail. Everything the curse has ever used against him.

He stands in all of it.

The chain is cold around his wrists. The stone at his back is the mountain itself. The Bondmark burns steady.

She is still here. Four minutes. She said four minutes.

She steps into his space.

He hears her before he sees her—her footsteps on the fractured floor, careful, reading the surface as she crosses it. Then she is close. Six inches from him, standing inside the chain’s reach.

Of course she did.

She doesn’t speak immediately.

She stands close enough that he can see the actual texture of her face—the faint lines at the corners of her eyes from ten years of focus-work, the silver of old scars at her collar where her coat has shifted. Her eyes are darker than usual. Deep and wrong and absorbing-dark. She has been taking curse magic into her body for the past twenty-five minutes and she is still standing and she is still here.

She holds still and lets him look.

He looks at her.

The hallucination tries to overlay. He holds it at distance through the chain and through the Bondmark and through the lifetime of daily management, and now he holds it at distance through her face. Through the texture of her at six inches. Through the way she breathes—he knows her breathing, he knows what controlled looks like and what easy looks like and what careful looks like, and what she is doing right now is careful and focused and present and the curse cannot reproduce that with the precision it needs to override what he knows.

He has kissed that mouth. He knows exactly what is real and the curse has nothing that touches it.

“Steady.”

Her voice. Not the version. Hers.

He is.

He stays.

She stays close.

She doesn’t leave. She doesn’t step back to give him air or professional distance. She stays in the chain’s reach and keeps working—he can feel through the Bondmark that the reversal has started, Ziva pulling the mechanism backward through the same channels she used to compress it—and she stays close while she does it.

The warmth of her—close enough that the cold of the crypt hasn’t found the space between them—is not the Bondmark warmth. It is the actual warmth of a person alive in the cold of the Foundation Crypt, radiating heat the way people do when they are present and breathing and real. It lands in his chest somewhere below the sigil’s pressure, distinct from the curse’s noise, a frequency the mechanism cannot replicate.

The chains bite into his wrists.

He does not move.

He looks at her face and does not stop looking.

Somewhere in the second minute the curse produces its clearest version yet of her death at his hands. Fully rendered. Complete with the stillness after. He looks at it and he looks at her face and he holds both and the real one wins.

Not because the hallucination is unconvincing.

Because she is here. Six inches. Breathing carefully in the cold of this chamber with her hands doing the most demanding work of her career while she stands in reach of a man with three centuries of accumulated curse in his body.

The real one is always going to win. Because she is in it.

He holds onto that like a chain of his own.