Page 17 of Tusks And Conditions

"How does a crossbow break in two weeks?"

"I hit someone with it."

She peers at me over her legal pad, and her mouth does the thing again, the almost-laugh that she suppresses with visible effort, and I assume that I would happily break a hundred crossbows if it meant she'd look at me like that each time. The evening light comes through the new window, the one I repaired yesterday, and it falls across the sheet-covered floor in long golden rectangles that make the whole room look soft and warm and lived-in. The smell of peanut sauce and her shampoo hits me, something clean and faintly floral that I first noticed when I pulled her against me for the inspector's benefit and have been unable to stop noticing since.

"Your deductions are a disaster. You're overpaying by at least thirty percent. Maybe more. You haven't claimed half the deductions you're entitled to, and your mileage tracking is nonexistent."

"I track mileage."

"You wrote 'drove a lot' on a napkin and stuffed it in the bag."

"That's tracking."

"Let me fix this. All of it. I'll set up a proper system. Categorized folders, quarterly reconciliation, digital backups. You'll never overpay again."

Not the land. Not the quiet. This. A warm room. Takeout containers. Someone who cares enough to sort through the wreckage of my professional life and impose order on it with colored tabs and quarterly reconciliation schedules. Someone who almost laughs at my jokes and calls my tax strategy a disaster with the same tenderness other people reserve for love poems.

"Yeah. Alright. Fix it."

She nods once, businesslike, and picks up her legal pad again, and we sit together on the floor of her living room while the light fades from gold to amber to the deep blue of early evening, and I do not move, and I do not speak, because the silence between us has changed. It isn't loaded anymore. It is comfortable. It is the silence of two people sharing a small, ordinary space, and I would burn down every bounty office in the city before I'd give this up.

The Snarbo snores softly by the kitchen island. Sabine's pen scratches against the legal pad. I raise my paperback and find my page, and for twenty minutes, nothing happens at all, and it is the best twenty minutes of my life.

Then someone knocks on the door.

Not the sharp, officious knock of a DMI inspector. Not the frantic crash of a bounty target. This knock is slow. Three measured beats, evenly spaced, with the kind of deliberate patience that suggests the person on the other side is in no hurry because they already know you're going to answer. I know this knock. I've heard it four times in my career, and each time it preceded something that left scars.

Sabine looks up from her legal pad. "Are you expecting someone?"

"Stay here." I'm on my feet before the second word leaves my mouth, and the speed of the movement makes her flinch, and makes the Snarbo snap awake with all seven eyes wide and rolling. I cross the room in three strides and pull the door open, and the hallway outside is empty except for a single figure standing perfectly still beneath the flickering fluorescent light.

The courier is tall and thin, wrapped in a coat that seems to absorb the light around it rather than reflect it. Its face is obscured beneath a deep hood, and its hands, grey and long-fingered and wrong in a way that makes my arms flare hot, extend a single envelope toward me. Black paper. Black wax seal. The seal is stamped with a mark I recognize instantly, a coiled serpent eating its own eye, and my stomach drops through the floor.

I take the envelope. The courier's fingers release it without a sound, and then the figure turns and walks down the hallway, and its footsteps make no noise on the carpet, and by the time it reaches the stairwell door it has already begun to fade at the edges like smoke dissolving into cold air.

I close the door. I stand with my back to Sabine and hold the black envelope in both hands, and the paper is cold against my palms, not from the cold, but from the magic soaked into its fibers. I know what this is. Every bounty hunter in the territory knows what a black-marked envelope means.

"Jagger?" Sabine' is careful. Controlled. "What is that?"

I break the seal. I unfold the single sheet of black paper inside, and the words are written in ink that glows a dull, arterial red, and they are very simple, and they are addressed to me by name, and they are a death warrant.

CHAPTER 9

SABINE

The change in him is immediate and total.

One moment we are sitting on my living room floor surrounded by crumpled receipts and half-eaten containers of pad thai, and the next he is standing at the door with his back to me like a wall of grey brick, his shoulders drawn up and locked, the lines on his forearms pulsing in a rhythm I haven't seen before. Not the slow, warm amber of irritation or the bright flicker he gets when the Snarbo chews on his boots. This is different. This is a deep, sullen red, like banked coals, steady and dangerous, and it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.

"Jagger?" I set down my legal pad. The pen rolls off the edge and hits the carpet without a sound. "What is that?"

He doesn't answer. He's reading something, a sheet of dark paper that seems to drink the light from the room the way a sponge drinks water, and his jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping beneath the slate-grey skin of his cheek.

He folds the paper in half. Then in quarters. Then he slides it into the back pocket of his jeans with a motion so deliberately casual it might as well be a flashing neon sign that reads SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG. When he turns around, his face is blank, wiped clean of everything except a flat, neutral calm that I recognize because I use the same expression every April when a client tells me they haven't filed taxes in six years.

"Nothing. Wrong address. Junk mail."

"Junk mail."