"You could have said something. Anything. 'Hey Magnolia, I have feelings.' 'Hey Magnolia, I'd like to take you to dinner.' 'Hey Magnolia, I'm going to ride my motorcycle into a death zone and fight a giant venomous arthropod because I'm too honorable to tell a five-foot-three baker that I like her.'"
A muscle jumps in his cheek.
"Instead you walked away. And I stood there holding gold coins in a puddle like an idiot and I drove home and I didn't bake for three days, Dash. Three days. I burned a batch of snickerdoodles. I have never burned snickerdoodles. Not once in eleven years of professional baking."
"Mrs. Patterson called about her granddaughter's birthday cake and I cried into the phone. Into the phone, Dash. She thought someone died. She almost called the police."
His good hand comes up. Hovers near my elbow. Doesn't land.
"So here's what's going to happen."
I release his vest with my right hand. I reach into the one clean pocket of my ruined dress, the interior pocket I sewed in myself because vintage dresses never have functional pockets, and I pull out the folded piece of paper I wrote at three in the morning on my kitchen counter while crying into a glass of Riesling.
I slam it against him.
The paper crinkles against his shredded vest. His good hand catches it reflexively, massive green fingers pressing it flat over his sternum.
"Read it."
He looks down. Unfolds the paper with one hand, the other arm hanging useless. His eyes move across the lines. I wrote it in my best piping-bag calligraphy, the same hand I use for wedding cakes, because if you're going to make a grand gesture you might as well make it legible.
His eyes stop moving.
"Lifetime exclusivity contract," I say. "Non-negotiable terms. Paragraph one: the party of the first part, that's you, agrees to never take another solo crawler bounty without backup. Paragraph two: the party of the second part, that's me, agrees to provide unlimited baked goods in perpetuity. Paragraph three: both parties agree that the previous contract is hereby voided and replaced with a permanent, binding, non-professional arrangement. Paragraph four: the party of the first part will sleep in the actual bed and not on a dismantled wardrobe."
His eyes reach the bottom of the page.
"I included a signature line. There's a pen in my other pocket."
Wind gusts across the slag. The van ticks. In the crevice, the juvenile crawler whimpers.
His good hand tightens on the paper. His eyes lift from the page to my face. Blood and ichor and powdered sugar and all.
CHAPTER 18
DASH
The paper shakes in my hand.
Not from blood loss. Not from the venom creeping through the gash in my left arm. Not from the three cracked ribs or the dislocated shoulder or the chunk of flesh the crawler tore from my thigh.
From her handwriting.
She used the same looping script she pipes onto wedding cakes. The capital D in "Dash" has a little flourish at the top, a tiny curl that serves no functional purpose except to be beautiful. She dotted her i's with perfect circles. She wrote "in perpetuity" in paragraph two and underlined it twice.
She wrote this at her kitchen counter. At three in the morning. In calligraphy.
For me.
The combat knife falls first. It hits the slag with a dull thunk, blade sinking two inches into volcanic gravel. The bandolier goes next, three incendiary charges and a smoke grenade clattering across the rocks like dropped marbles. The short sword follows, the one I keep strapped to my back, the one my father gave me when I turned fourteen and said a mercenary who can't reach his blade deserves the death he gets.
It clangs against the dirt. I don't look at it.
The gauntlet on my good hand. The ankle knife. The weighted chain wrapped around my belt. The tiny derringer tucked into my boot, the one I've carried on every contract for eleven years, the one I've never once had to fire because the sight of an Orc pulling a gun confuses people long enough for me to close distance.
All of it. Every piece of metal and leather and death I've carried since I was old enough to swing a blade. It falls into the dust at my feet and I stand in front of this five-foot-three woman in a ruined dress covered in crawler blood and powdered sugar and I have nothing in my hands except a piece of paper.
"Pen."
