CHAPTER 1
SOLENE
The smoke hits me before I even open the front door ofVerdure.
A wall of acrid, wood-heavy smoke that rolls across Rue des Martyrs like a fog bank with a grudge. My hand freezes on the brass handle. Through the glass, I see a plume of grey-black char billow from the building directly across the street, thick enough to cast a shadow on the sidewalk.
No.
I push through the door. The smell is worse out here. Primal. Aggressive. Like someone set an entire forest on fire and decided to season it.
My gaze snaps to the source.
The storefront across from mine, the one that sat vacant for eleven blessed, quiet months, now sports a hand-painted sign I haven't seen before. The letters are crude, blocky, painted in what appears to be actual blood-red pigment on a slab of rough-hewn wood:
BOROG'S. MEAT. FIRE.
Three words. No subtlety. No punctuation consistency. A thesis statement in barbarism.
And beneath that sign, on the sidewalk, on a Parisian morning where civilized people are buying croissants and readingLe Monde, a massive orc is tending to what can only be described as a bonfire.
Abonfire. Flames lick four feet into the air from a crude iron pit that has no business existing on a public sidewalk. Sparks spiral upward and drift across the street toward my ventilation system. Toward my restaurant. Toward the linen napkins I hand-pressed yesterday.
My chef coat is spotless. Starched this morning at 5 AM. Every button aligned. I haven't even started prep yet, and already this day is ruined.
I step off the curb.
A taxi blares its horn. I don't stop. The driver swerves, shouts something about my mother. I cut between a delivery van and a cyclist, my clogs slapping the cobblestones, coat flaring behind me like a cape. A Citroën brakes hard enough to squeal. I hold up one hand without looking and keep moving.
The heat reaches me six feet from the pit.
Heat. The kind that tightens skin and dries eyes. The orc crouches beside it, his back to me, feeding a split log the diameter of my thigh into the flames with the casual ease of someone adding a sugar cube to tea. His arms are bare, green-skinned, corded with muscle that shifts under the surface like tectonic plates. A leather apron hangs from his neck, scarred and blackened across the front. He hums. Low, rumbling, tuneless. The ground vibrates with it.
"Excuse me."
Nothing. The humming continues. He adjusts the log with his bare hand.His bare hand, directly in the fire, repositioning it like a throw pillow.
"Excuse me!"
The humming stops. His head turns. Slowly. The way a boulder might rotate if boulders had tusks.
Two tusks, specifically. They jut upward from a heavy jaw, yellowed and chipped at the tips. His face is broad, flat-nosed, dominated by deep-set eyes. A thick scar bisects his left brow and disappears into a mane of black hair pulled into a topknot with what looks like butcher's twine. He blinks at me once.
"You are small chef from across street."
"I am theownerof the restaurant across the street, and you need to put this out. Now." I gesture at the inferno between us. A spark lands on my sleeve. I swat it dead before it can leave a mark.
He stands.
My neck cranes. Up, and then further up. He is not just massive. He is as big as a commercial refrigerator wearing an apron. My head reaches somewhere around his sternum, and his sternum is a shelf I could set a cutting board on.
"Is seasoning fire." He says this like it explains everything. His thick fingers wave dismissively. "Needs two more hours."
"Two morehours? You're shooting embers onto a public street. You're smoking out my dining room. You don't have a permit for open flame, you can't possibly have a permit for open flame, this is the ninth arrondissement, not acampground."
He scratches the base of one tusk with a blackened thumbnail. His brow furrows, which rearranges his entire face into something that resembles a rockslide in progress.
"Fire has been burning since four in morning. You are only one complaining."