A sound escapes her that is part laugh, part something wet and broken. She grips the handle properly, instinctively, her fingers finding the exact positions I carved for them. The blade rises. She tests the balance with a small, professional tilt of her wrist, and the steel floats. Perfectly weighted. An extension of her arm.
"The edge," she whispers.
"Fifteen degrees per side. Your preference. I saw you sharpen your station knives."
"You saw me sharpen-"
"I see everything you do."
Her chin drops. Her shoulders shake. A single drop hits the blade and slides down the mirror polish without leaving a mark.
She launches.
No warning. No telegraphing. No careful consideration of the six-inch height difference or the physics involved in a five-foot-seven woman hurling herself at a six-foot-five orc in a narrow alley between two dumpsters.
She just goes.
The knife stays locked in her right hand, blade angled safely away from both of us with the kind of automatic spatial awareness that only a trained chef possesses even while mid-leap. Her left arm, the bandaged one, hooks around my neck. Her feet leave the ground entirely. The full weight of her hits me like a bag of flour tossed from a loading dock, and my boots scrape back two inches on the concrete before I catch her.
My arms close around her waist. She is shaking. Her face is buried in the hollow where my neck meets my shoulder, and the sound she makes against my skin is raw and uncontrolled and nothing like the precise, measured woman who adjusts microgreens with surgical tweezers.
"You absolute lunatic," she says into my collarbone. "You forged me a knife."
"You grabbed a four-hundred-degree skillet handle for me. A knife seemed reasonable."
"Those are not equivalent acts."
"You're right. Yours was braver."
She pulls back just enough to look at me. Her eyes are red. Tear tracks cut clean lines through the soot still smudged on her cheekbones. The yellow alley light turns the wetness to gold.
"I'm keeping this forever," she says. Not about me. About the knife. But also, maybe, hopefully, about me.
"That's the idea."
Her legs are still off the ground. I'm holding her entire body weight with my arms wrapped under her thighs, and she weighs roughly the same as a holiday turkey, which is to say: nothing. She could hang here all night and my arms wouldn't notice. What my arms notice is the heat of her through the thin chef's coat, the way her hip bones press against my stomach, the way her hurt hand has landed on the back of my head and her fingers are threading through my hair.
"Put me down."
"No."
"Boris."
"You jumped. I caught. Possession is nine-tenths of the law."
She laughs, and the vibration travels through her ribcage directly into mine. "That applies to property disputes, not people."
"I'm an orc. We don't distinguish."
The knife catches the light as she shifts it to a safer angle behind my head. She studies my face from above. A novel perspective for her. She takes full advantage, tilting my chin up with the heel of her bandaged palm.
"Your lip is split."
"Razor hawk."
"You have gravel embedded in your forearms."
"Cliff face."