Her knuckles go white on the wheel. She knows the name. Everyone in the supernatural district knows the name. Grimjaw the Collector. Guild Master of the Iron Fang Mercenary Company. Seven feet two inches of scarred, ancient Orc muscle with a jaw like a bear trap and a policy written in actual blood.
No one retires from the Iron Fang.
No one walks away from a contract guild with a perfect record and a reputation worth its weight in gold. Grimjaw doesn't allow it. The investment is too great. The training, the contacts, the years of built loyalty and shared blood debts. A mercenary who leaves is a mercenary who takes guild secrets with him, and Grimjaw has exactly one method for settling that kind of account.
Trial by combat.
"I have to fight him."
She doesn't speak for three full seconds. The van hums over a seam in the highway.
"Fight him how?"
"Bare hands. Stone circle. First one to yield or die."
"YIELD OR DIE?"
"It's mostly ceremonial."
"THE DYING PART IS CEREMONIAL?"
"The yielding part. Nobody yields. That's the ceremonial aspect."
She slams both palms against the wheel. The horn blares across three lanes. A pixie on a racing broom swerves and curses at them in Sylvan.
"When?"
"I have to formally submit my resignation by sundown tomorrow. The fight happens at dawn the day after."
Her jaw works. Her hands grip the wheel at ten and two, flour-dusted knuckles bone-white, and the speedometer climbs past seventy. Seventy-five. Eighty.
"Fine."
"Fine?"
"I'm coming."
"Magnolia—"
"I didn't drive a van into a rock crawler and ruin a twenty-dollar bag of King Arthur bread flour to watch you get killed in a parking lot by your middle manager."
"Stone circle. Not a parking lot. And Grimjaw is more of a CEO."
She takes the city exit at eighty-five. The van catches air over a pothole. Sheet pans crash in the back like a cymbal section falling down stairs.
"Monday. You start Monday. So whatever you need to punch between now and then, punch it fast."
Her hand leaves the wheel. Finds my knee. Squeezes once. Hard.
Baker's hands.
I cover her fingers with mine. My scarred, bandaged, lavender-scented hand over her small, flour-dusted, iron-gripped one.
Monday. I start Monday.
I just have to survive Sunday first.
The dawn air in the canyon tastes of copper and dust. Around us, fifty mercenaries of the Iron Fang form a living wall, their silence heavier than the stone circle beneath my boots. Grimjaw stands at the center. Seven feet and two inches of ancient, immovable muscle, his face a ruin of old wars and his iron-plated jaw locked in a permanent sneer. He doesn't look at the bakery van idling just outside the perimeter. He only looks atme, calculating the exact location of my cracked ribs and sutured thigh.
