Page 13 of Orc's Veil

He doesn’t retreat. Doesn’t advance. Just stands there, a wall of muscle and armor and barely contained violence, while I bleed at his feet and dare him to see the truth.

“You believe that.” His voice is rougher than before. Unsteady.

“I know that.” I hold up my bleeding palm. “Years of proof, carved into my own flesh. How many scars does the order carry? How much blood have they given to the barrier they claim to protect?”

His expression shifts. Not much—he’s too controlled for much—but enough. The iron certainty wavers. Doubt creeps in at the edges.

“The evidence—” he starts.

“The evidence is right here.” I gesture at the stones, at the nearly-closed tear, at the blood still flowing from my palm. “The evidence is that the Veil settles when I bleed and screams when I stop. The evidence is that I’ve kept this barrier intact while the order watched from a safe distance and took notes.”

I step closer still. Close enough that a single breath separates us, that I can feel him at the edge of my senses the way the Veil feels a fault-line—present, unavoidable, inevitable.

He flinches.

It’s tiny—a flicker of movement, a tightening around his eyes—but I see it. The question landed. Found a wound beneath all that armor and certainty.

“The sentence—” His voice catches. Steadies. “The sentence stands.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only answer I have.”

We stand there, inches apart, both of us wounded in different ways. The Veil hums around us—settled by my offering, disturbed by his presence, caught between opposing forces. The air between us crackles with tension that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the warmth spreading through my chest, the awareness prickling across my skin.

Don’t.I order myself.Don’t look at his mouth. Don’t wonder what he tastes like. Don’t?—

I look at his mouth.

His lips are fuller than I expected, softer-looking against the harsh planes of his face. The tusks frame them, ivory and iron, brutal and strangely beautiful. He catches me looking.

Something shifts in those orange-gold eyes, heat moving through their depths like a current finding new channels.

He doesn’t look away.

The moment stretches, heavy and electric. I should step back. Should put distance between us, maintain the careful balance of power I’ve been trying to establish. He’s here to kill me. Whatever this heat is, whatever this wanting is, it doesn’t change that fundamental truth.

But I don’t step back. And neither does he.

NINE

EIRENE

The Veil screams.

Not the gradual building of pressure I’ve learned to recognize. Not the slow crescendo that warns me a breach is forming. This is sudden, violent, a shriek of alarm that tears through my skull and makes my knees buckle.

A breach is forming.

I spin toward the stones. The tear I just closed is holding—barely—but a new disturbance ripples near the eastern edge of the circle. A fresh breach, smaller but angrier, spitting darkness into the perpetual twilight.

And through it, a creature emerges.

It’s the size of a wolf, if wolves were made of shadow and wrong angles. It moves with a fluid wrongness—solidifying and dissolving with each step, bleeding darkness from wounds that have no source. Its eyes are empty pits that somehow still see, fixed on me with hungry intent.

A Veilspawn. Shadow-twisted. Hungry for blood.

I raise my knife, knowing it won’t be enough. Black iron can hurt shadow-creatures, but I’m exhausted, bleeding, in no condition to fight a beast this size. My twilight magic isdrained to dregs. My body is running on nothing but will and desperation.