Page 18 of The Orc's Thief
She moves forward, and joy explodes in my chest. She feels it too, recognizing me as her mate, just as I do her. I reach out, and she pulls back, then slams her fist into my face.
I jerk in place, confusion and hurt replacing the hope and excitement of finding her. Her hit wasn’t particularly strong, and she wasn’t close enough to deliver more than a glancing blow, but this is no way to greet one’s mate.
“Ow!” she yelps in pain, cradling her hand to her chest. “Fuck! Oh, ow.”
It’s only then that I see something’s wrong with her hand, the skin strangely bumpy. If she was injured, why did she break in—oh. She must have sustained the injury during the burglary.
“Let me see.”
I approach her again, trying to take her hand, but she dances away from me, perilously close to the edge.
I lift my hands in surrender and retreat. “Hey, now. I won’t hurt you. I just want to help.”
She narrows her pretty eyes at me. “Right. Stay away from me.”
Gods, I wish she’d take off the scarf covering her face. I need to see her, all of her, but I’ll settle for just her face first. In the driving rain, all I can tell is that she’s shorter than me and wearing pants instead of a skirt, which is definitely the better choice for climbing buildings.
My mate is smart—I can already tell.
I stare at her, then shake my head to clear my thoughts. She might be smart, but she also punched me and would’ve stabbed me if I hadn’t knocked the dagger from her hand.
“We can’t stay here,” I tell her, trying to sound calm and reasonable, even though I’m anything but. “Come, I have a rope.”
“Why are you following me?” she demands, inching away from the edge toward the chimney.
She reaches for her boot and pulls out another knife. But instead of aiming for me, she cuts the length of rope tied to the chimney.
I want to tell her she’s my mate, that I would never hurt her, but her defensive stance says she wouldn’t take the news well. I’ve waited too long to fuck this up—I can wait a while longer.
“You stole from me,” I say. “I wanted to see what you were up to tonight.”
She steps back and pulls something from her satchel.
“Ah. I should’ve known this was about the gold.”
She draws her arm back and throws the object at me. I react on instinct, lunging for it, but my foot slips on the wet roof tiles. Not wanting to plummet to my death, I land on my hands and knees, then roll into a crouch.
A glance at my hand confirms it—a purse, no doubt stolen from the building below. But she threw it as a diversion, because she’s already running, keeping low to the roof and disappearing into the night.
“Fuck!”
I stuff the purse into my pocket and rush after her, but she’s lighter and clearly used to this. She scales the ridge of the roof ahead of me without pausing, then ducks out of sight.
By the time I reach her, she’s slipping through a rooftop window, much like the one in the attic of that family’s home across from my inn. I grab for her cloak, but she jumps and landswith a thud in the attic below, leaving me empty-handed, staring down into the dark.
The window is too narrow for me to fit through. If I tried, I’d get stuck and waste precious time. How she sees where she’s going, I have no idea, but her footsteps recede with alarming speed. A creak of a door tells me she’s making her way downstairs, which means…
“No,” I growl.
I lunge back and run to the end of the row of buildings, where I’d scaled the wall to get up here. My rope is still there, wet and cold. I tie in and lower myself over the edge, my hands shaking as I descend, the need to be near my mate pounding through me.
This is nothing like the others said it would be. They spoke of joy and elation, of the full-bodied conviction that they had found their partner for life. But none of their mates tried to knock their teeth out, did they?
I miss a foothold and slip, and only the clip secured to the iron flower planter saves me from falling two stories and breaking my neck. I force myself to focus and unclip from the now-bent planter, then carefully climb down until, finally, my boot touches the roof of the barber shop.
I shouldn’t leave the rope hanging here. Knowing what my mate gets up to at night, I’ll probably need it again. But the urge to catch up with her outweighs caution. I cut the rope from my waist, stuff the climbing clips into the satchel I left on the roof with my cloak, and jump from the low roof onto the street.
Where is she?
