Page 13 of Tusks And Conditions

The Fae woman's gaze sweeps the room with surgical precision. I watch her eyes track from the rumpled bed to the dual nightstands—her financial guide displaced by my leather bracers, my thick novel sitting boldly on the right side—to the open closet where my jacket hangs among her clothes like a dark intruder in a pastel kingdom. She notes the shaving kit visible through the en suite bathroom door, the heavy boots tucked beside the dresser, the knife belt that I understand with a spike of alarm is slightly visible beneath the bed skirt.

"Cozy," she says. The word carries no inflection whatsoever.

"We've been making it work. It's a one-bedroom, so space is tight, but we manage."

"Manage." There is that word again, and the inspector writes something in her portfolio with a long, deliberate stroke of her pen. She looks up, and those winter-pale eyes settle on us with an intensity that makes my arm runes prickle with defensive energy. "You use that word frequently, Ms. Lin. Managing. It suggests tolerance rather than genuine bonding."

"We're still in the early stages," I say, pulling Sabine closer against my side, feeling the warmth of her through my bare skin. "The bond is new. We're learning each other."

"Are you?" Inspector Delacroix closes her portfolio with a soft snap and tucks the pen into her breast pocket with deliberate slowness. She takes one step into the bedroom, then another, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor that borders Sabine's area rug. She is close enough now that I can feel the faint shimmer of Fae magic radiating from her, a cold, probing energy that presses against my skin like fingers searching for a pulse. "Mr. Ironjaw, I've conducted over three hundred cohabitation inspections in the last fiscal year. I know what a genuine bonded household feels like. The emotional resonance, the territorial markers, the unconscious gravitational pull between mates." She pauses, letting the words settle. "And I know what a performance looks like."

The room goes very still. Meatball, who has followed us down the hall with dogged loyalty has bonded to a food source, presses his body against my ankle and makes a low, worried gurgling noise.

"I'm going to need a demonstration," Inspector Delacroix says, and her gaze locks onto the narrow space between Sabine and me like she can see the tension humming there, electric and unresolved. "A kiss. Between mates. Right now, if you don't mind."

Sabine's fingers clamp down on my ribs so hard I'm fairly certain she's left permanent indentations.

CHAPTER 7

SABINE

The inspector wants a kiss.

A kiss. Between me and the enormous, shirtless Orc currently pressed against my side like a wall of warm granite, whose heartbeat I can feel through the bare skin of his arm where it wraps around my shoulders. My brain, that reliable instrument that has carried me through four years of university, a CPA exam, and six consecutive tax seasons without a single breakdown, simply... stops. The gears grind. The spreadsheet goes blank. Every cell in every column reads ERROR.

"We don't have all afternoon, Ms. Lin," Inspector Delacroix says, her pen poised over her portfolio like a scalpel over an operating table.

Jagger's arm tightens around me, just barely. He angles his body toward mine, and the movement is so fluid, so natural, that for a disorienting second I forget this is a performance. His free hand comes up and cups the side of my jaw, and the sheer scale of him registers in a way it hasn't before. His palm covers my entire cheek. His fingers curl around the back of my neck, rough-callused and impossibly warm, and his thumb settles against the hinge of my jaw with a gentleness that seems anatomically impossible for a hand that large. I have watched this man crush a bounty target's wrist like a breadstick. I have watched him rip a window frame out of its housing with his bare hands and reset it like it was nothing. And now that same hand cradles my face like I am something rare and breakable, and the contradiction sends a jolt of electricity straight down my spine that roots me to the floor.

"Sabine." He tips my chin up, and I have to crane my neck to meet his eyes because the height difference is staggering, and his face is so close that I can see every detail I've been trying very hard not to catalog over the last forty-eight hours. The fine scar that bisects his left eyebrow. The silver ring threaded through his tusk, glinting in the bedroom's overhead light. The surprising darkness of his lashes against slate-grey skin.

He lowers his head. Slowly. Giving me time to pull away, which is considerate and also infuriating because my legs have stopped accepting commands from my central nervous system and I couldn't pull away if I wanted to. His lips brush mine, and the contact is light, almost experimental, the barest graze of rough, warm skin against my mouth. It lasts maybe half a second. Then he presses in, and the world narrows to a single point of contact.

His lips are rougher than I expected. Dry and firm, with a texture that comes from years of weather and violence, but there is nothing violent about the way he kisses me. He moves slowly, deliberately, his mouth slanting over mine with a careful pressure that suggests he is painfully aware of every ounce of strength coiled in his body and is holding all of it in check. The hand on my jaw doesn't tighten. It just holds, steady as a shelf, while his mouth opens slightly against mine and I taste something warm and faintly herbal, like the Orcish tea he brewed this morning from a pouch in his bag that smelled like pine needles and woodsmoke.

My brain, that traitorous machine, reboots. But instead of returning to its regularly scheduled programming of logic and order and sensible risk assessment, it comes back online running entirely new software. Software that catalogs his breath against my upper lip. The way his tusk presses gently against the corner of my mouth, smooth and warm where the silver piercing sits.

I grip the front of his... he's not wearing a shirt. I grip the front of his body, my fingers splaying against bare skin that is hot and dense with muscle, and somewhere in the wreckage of my higher reasoning I register that I am voluntarily touching him and that my hand is shaking and that I don't seem to care. The runic tattoos under my palm pulse once, a single, warm throb of light that I feel as much as see, and his breath catches.

Then it's over. He pulls back, and the loss of contact hits me like a slap of cold air. His hand lingers on my jaw for one extra beat before dropping to his side, and when I look up at him his expression is perfectly, carefully neutral, but his eyes are not. His eyes are molten. Dark and burning and fixed on my mouth with an intensity that makes my knees feel like they've been replaced with warm pudding.

I take a step backward. Then another. My heel connects with Meatball, who yelps, and the sharp, ridiculous sound snaps through the tension in the room like a rubber band.

Inspector Delacroix writes something in her portfolio with a heavy, deeply put-upon sigh.

"It's a performance, of course," she says, her pale eyes narrowing. "A very good one, but a performance nonetheless. The resonance is completely chaotic." I freeze, my heart dropping straight into my comfortable flats, but she just waves her pen dismissively.

"Fortunately for you, I have exactly zero desire to fill out the eighty-four pages of paperwork required to process a dissolution recommendation today. And you did actually kiss him, which satisfies the technical requirement of Section 14-C." She clicks her pen shut and tucks it away, then runs one final, sweeping gaze over the bedroom.

"The cohabitation arrangement is officially legitimate. Your next inspection will be unannounced and will occur within the following thirty days. I recommend you improve your domestic performance before you get an inspector who actually enjoys paperwork." She pauses in the doorway and glances back over her shoulder, one silver eyebrow arched. "And Mr. Ironjaw, perhaps invest in a dresser. Your weapons shouldn't be stored under the bed skirt."

The front door opens, closes, and locks. The click of Fae heels fades down the hallway, then disappears entirely.

Silence.

The apartment feels suddenly, oppressively small. Jagger stands in my bedroom doorway with his arms at his sides, filling the frame from shoulder to shoulder, and I stand by the bed with Meatball pressed against my ankle, and between us there is approximately six feet of hardwood floor that might as well be a minefield. The air is thick with something I refuse to name. It sits on my skin like humidity. I can still feel the phantom pressure of his mouth on mine, the ghost of his palm against my jaw, and every time I blink I see the flash of heat in his eyes and my stomach does that horrible flipping thing again.

"So, she's gone."