I don't care.
I care about the way Junia's chin tilts up when she argues. The defiant jut of it. The way she loaded "page forty-seven, paragraph three" like a crossbow bolt and fired it directly through Valerius's composure. The way her hands shake now, after, because she's brave enough to act before the fear catches up.
She's still touching my arm. One fingertip. That's all. One point of contact, sap-sticky and warm, pressed against my bandage where the rune forstrength in battlepulses like a second heartbeat.
"You read the entire charter," I say again. Because the fact keeps detonating in my skull.
"The font was really small. Like, aggressively small. I think Valerius chose it specifically to discourage reading."
"Eight hundred pages."
"Some of them were diagrams."
"Of what?"
"Acceptable fence picket spacing. There are seventeen approved configurations. Mine violates twelve of them." She grins. Crooked. One canine slightly overlapping the tooth beside it. "I have a lot of citations coming."
A sound escapes me. Low. Rumbling. Foreign.
Junia blinks.
"Did you just laugh?"
"No."
"That was a laugh."
"It was a tactical exhale."
"Flynn Danger, youlaughed."
The sound comes again. Bigger this time. Shaking loose from somewhere behind my sternum that I sealed shut years ago with routine and precision and exactly three inches of grass height maintained with a spirit level.
Her grin widens. Full wattage. The kind of smile that violates at least four HOA regulations regarding brightness levels and visual disruption.
"You're dangerous," I tell her.
"Says the seven-foot orc with glowing battle tattoos."
"Six-seven."
"Okay, the six-foot-seven orc with glowing battle tattoos who catches falling trees with his bare hands and is currently lit up like a green lantern because I quoted a bylaw at an elf."
My jaw works. The runes pulse. She's not wrong about any of it, and the accuracy makes the heat worse.
"That wasn't just quoting a bylaw." I step closer. Not much. An inch. Her curls brush my me again. "That was warfare."
Her breath catches. Quick. Almost hidden.
"I grew up in a florist shop," she whispers. "My mom always said the deadliest weapon in any garden is the permit."
"Your mother is a tactician."
"My mother is a Sagittarius."
Another tactical exhale. Longer this time. Junia's eyes crinkle at the corners and her fingertip presses harder against the rune and the green light flares so bright it throws their joined shadow, one massive and one small, all the way across the torn-up yard to the archway that she just saved with nothing but words.
I cover her hand with mine.
