Page 49 of Orc'd & Loaded
"Boris, the sear temperature is not negotiable."
"Everything is negotiable. That is the entire point of collaboration."
"Collaboration does not mean you override every..."
His elbow clips the stock pot. The stock pot nudges the skillet. The skillet tips.
Twelve pounds of blazing cast iron slides off the counter's edge.
Straight down toward his foot.
CHAPTER 12
BORIS
The skillet drops.
Twelve pounds of screaming iron, edge-first, plummeting straight for the thin bones on my foot. I'm wearing leather boots, not steel-toed, because I dressed for cooking and not for dodging artillery.
Solene moves.
Not thinks. Not hesitates. Not calculates the trajectory or weighs her options or considers the temperature of a cast iron pan that's been kissing an open flame for six minutes.
She lunges.
Her right hand shoots out and clamps around the handle. Bare. No towel. No mitt. No anything between her skin and metal that could fry an egg on contact.
The skillet stops three inches above my foot. Suspended. Trembling in her white-knuckled grip.
The odor hits first. Hot iron and something else. Something organic and wrong.
Her face doesn't change. Not immediately. The mask holds for a full second. Two seconds. Her jaw locked, her eyes fixed on some middle distance past my shoulder, her arm rigid as a steelbeam. She lifts the skillet with a controlled, precise motion that would make a surgeon weep.
Then the mask cracks.
Her fingers uncurl. The palm is already blistering. Angry red welts rising across the heel of her hand and the pads of her fingers in a perfect mirror of the handle's curve. The skin is white where the contact was deepest.
"Solene."
She stares at her hand like it belongs to someone else.
"Solene."
"I'm fine."
She is not fine. She is the exact opposite of fine. The blisters are swelling in real time, fluid filling the pockets beneath her skin while I stand here like a useless mountain.
I grab her wrist. Gentle. The way you'd hold a bird with a broken wing, which is a comparison I will never say out loud because she'd put the other hand on that skillet just to have a weapon.
"Cold water. Now."
"I know the protocol for a burn, Boris."
"Then move."
She moves. Not toward the sink. Toward the prep station. Toward the dish. She reaches for the spoon with her left hand, the ruined right hand curling against her body, and stirs the reduction like her palm isn't actively cooking itself from residual heat.
I step in front of her. All six feet five inches. A wall of green-gray skin and leather apron and absolute refusal to negotiate.
