Page 25 of Tusks And Conditions

"I brought pepper spray."

"Pepper spray." He says the words like they personally offend him. Like the concept of capsaicin as a defensive mechanism has committed a crime against his entire ancestral line. "A Goblin war-chain can strip flesh to the bone in a single pass and you brought pepper spray."

"Industrial grade. I checked the..."

"The Scoville rating, yes, you mentioned that, while standing in a doorway surrounded by six armed supernatural mercenaries, any one of which could have killed you before the spray left the canister."

He's terrified.

"You could have died." His jaw works. The silver piercings catch the streetlight as we pass under a lamp. "You picked my lock, walked into a combat zone, and stood in front of a charging Goblin with office supplies."

"The stapler is very heavy. It's a Swingline 747."

"Sabine."

He hugs me to him.

"I couldn't stay in the apartment. I traced the money trail. I found the address. I knew you were walking into a setup and I couldn't just sit there organizing your receipts while..."

"While I handled the situation I am specifically trained to handle?"

"While you got killed. You absolute walnut."

His stride falters. Just for a second. Half a step where his boot catches on the wet pavement and his arms readjust around me, and when I pull back far enough to see his face, the expression on it is something I have no spreadsheet for. No column. No category. No neat, colorful label in my filing system that accounts for the way a massive, battle-scarred Orc bounty hunter looks at you when you call him a walnut in the rain after almost dying together in a parking lot.

"A walnut," he repeats.

"You heard me."

He observes at me for a long moment, rain streaming down his face, the last faint traces of gold flickering in the lines of his tattoos, and his eyes change. Something that was holding, bracing, maintaining distance. It gives way.

He carries me up the stairs without another word.

The apartment door is still open from my dramatic exit, which I'm going to have to address at some point from a home security perspective, but right now Jagger kicks it shut behind us and sets me down on the kitchen counter, not the floor, the counter, which puts my face roughly level with his throat and does absolutely nothing to diminish the scale of him. He stands between my knees and braces his hands on the counter on either side of my hips, caging me in, and his arms are shaking. Visibly. The heavy muscles of his forearms trembling with the sustained effort of coming down from whatever primal state he entered in that parking lot.

"You're shaking," I say.

"Adrenaline dump."

"You should sit down."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. Your pupils are still dilated and your respiration rate is..."

"Sabine." He leans forward. The movement brings his face close enough that I can see individual raindrops caught in his eyebrows and the fading glow in the deepest lines of his tattoos and the way his jaw is clenched so hard the muscle jumps visibly beneath his grey skin. "Stop analyzing my vitals and let me look at you."

I stop talking.

He looks at me. His eyes move over my face with a thoroughness that would feel clinical from anyone else but from him feels like something entirely different, something that catalogues and memorizes and commits to permanent storage, and his gaze catches on the small cut on my cheekbone where flying asphalt must have nicked me during the fight. I hadn't even noticed it. He notices it. His whole body goes rigid.

"You're hurt."

"It's a scratch."

His hand comes up. Enormous, scarred, the knuckles still raw from the fight, and he touches the cut with the pad of his thumb so gently that I barely feel the contact. The contrast is staggering. Those same hands threw a Troll through a steel wall four minutes ago. Those same fingers crushed a war-chain into scrap metal. And now the rough pad of his thumb traces a half-inch cut on my cheekbone with the delicacy of someone handling antique porcelain, and his skin against mine sends a jolt straight down my spine from the fact that I have been lying to myself for three days.

"It doesn't hurt," I whisper.