Page 16 of Tusks And Conditions

Whitfield sets his coffee cup down on the desk with a hand that trembles just enough to be visible.

"I'm sure," I say, "that none of this will be necessary. Because I'm sure you're a reasonable man who values the reputation of his firm and the loyalty of his most meticulous associate." I glance at Sabine. Just for a second. Just long enough to see the way her dark eyes have gone wide and bright with something I don’t recognize. "I'll be in the lobby. I brought a book."

I turn my back on him. This is deliberate. Turning your back on a man you've just dismantled tells him he isn't dangerous enough to warrant your continued attention. I open the glass door, duck through the frame, and walk back to the lobby, where I lower myself into the suffering leather chair and pull a battered paperback from my coat pocket. The Siege of Ashenmoor, volume three of the Ironkeep Chronicles. I've been looking forward to this one. The protagonist just discovered she's the heir to a dead kingdom, and there's a dragon involved, and I need to know what happens next.

Behind me, through the glass, I hear Whitfield clear his throat.

"Lin. That... that will be all. Take the day if you need it."

The drive back to her apartment is different from the drive to the office. Sabine grips the steering wheel at ten and two, same as before, but her jaw isn't clenched, and her breathing has settled into something slower and more even.

"You memorized federal interspecies employment law," she says finally, as we pull onto her street.

"Parts of it."

"Parts of it. You carry a notebook full of statute references in your vest pocket. Next to, I assume, several knives."

"Three. And a garrote. The notebook is more useful in most situations."

She parks the car with the same precise, controlled movements she applies to everything, each action measured and deliberate, and she sits for a moment with the engine off and her hands still on the wheel, staring through the windshield at the brick facade of her apartment building. The afternoon light catches the sharp line of her jaw, the clean edge of her dark hair where it falls just below her chin, and I have to look away because the impulse to reach over and brush that hair behind her ear is so strong it makes my fingers ache.

"Thank you," she says. The words come out stiff, like she's forcing them through a filter of pride and self-sufficiency that doesn't want to admit she needed help. "What you did in there. With Whitfield. That was..."

"Standard negotiation."

"That was brilliant. He looked like he was going to faint. Gerald Whitfield the Third, who once made a senior partner cry in a board meeting, looked like he was about to pass out on his own desk blotter."

"He should invest in better glass walls if he wants his threats to stay private."

A sound escapes her. Small, sharp, caught between a laugh and a breath. She covers her mouth with one hand, and her eyes crinkle at the corners, and I memorize every detail of that expression with the same thoroughness I apply to tracking fugitives across state lines because it is, without question, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen volcanic sunsets over the Ashfall Reaches and the bioluminescent caves of the Deep Narrows and none of them come close.

"Come on," she says, and she opens her car door. "I want to do something for you."

What she wants to do for me, it turns out, is my taxes.

Or rather, the catastrophic heap of crumpled receipts, torn invoices, and bloodstained expense reports that I have been shoving into a duffel bag for the better part of three years. She sits cross-legged on her living room floor, which she has covered with a clean sheet to protect the carpet, and she sorts through the pile with focused horror that I find enormously endearing. Her sleeves are rolled up. Her shoes are off. A pen is tucked behind her ear, and she has already filled two pages of a yellow legal pad with columns of numbers in handwriting so neat it looks printed.

"This receipt is covered in what I sincerely hope is barbecue sauce," she says, holding a wrinkled scrap of paper between her thumb and forefinger.

"It might be."

"It's not, is it?"

"Probably not."

She sets it on the pile labeled LEGITIMATE BUSINESS EXPENSES (BIOHAZARD) and moves on. I sit on the floor across from her, my back against the couch, because the couch itself has learned that it cannot support my weight without making sounds of structural distress, and she works. The Snarbo is curled in a ball by the kitchen island, all seven of its eyes half-closed in drowsy contentment. The takeout containers from the Thai place down the street sit between us, mostly empty. She ordered pad see ew. I ordered three entrees and ate them in the time it took her to eat half of hers. She mentally calculates the monthly grocery budget required to sustain an Orc.

"You claimed a crossbow as a business expense," she says, studying a receipt.

"It is a business expense."

"You claimed ammunition for the crossbow as a separate line item."

"The bolts are custom-made. Expensive."

"You claimed a replacement crossbow two weeks later."

"The first one broke."