Page 28 of Tusks And Conditions

He lays me down like I'm something precious and pulls the blanket over us. He curls his body around mine from behind, one arm draped over my waist, his hand resting flat against my stomach where my heartbeat pulses under his palm. His breath slows against the back of my neck. His body is a furnace along my spine like a wall, a boundary between me and every cold and dangerous thing in the world outside this bed.

I fall asleep in twelve seconds. Which is a personal record. My previous best was twenty-three minutes, achieved only with the aid of a white noise machine set to "gentle rainstorm" and precisely two milligrams of melatonin.

I wake to cold.

Not the dramatic, story-book cold of an empty bed that you notice immediately, your hand reaching across the sheets in cinematic slow motion. This is subtler. A gradual awareness that the furnace at my back has been removed, that the arm over my waist is gone, that the massive dent in the mattress beside me has sprung back to its original shape in a way that suggests the weight was lifted some time ago. My body registers the absence before my brain does, curling instinctively toward the vacant space, searching for heat that isn't there.

I open my eyes. The bedroom is grey with early dawn. My clothes, which were scattered across the floor last night in various states of damp urgency, have been collected and folded into a neat stack on the dresser. His have not. His are gone. The chest plate. The boots with the complicated lacing. The black shirt that smelled like ozone and rain.

The leather gear we scattered across the room to fool the DMI inspector is gone too. Every trace of him, the heavy belt hung over the closet door, the shoulder holster draped across the chair, the ridiculous combat knife he kept on the nightstand because he said he "slept better with a blade within reach." All of it. Removed with the kind of silent, surgical precision that only a professional tracker, someone trained to enter and exit spaces without detection, could achieve while their supposed mate slept six inches away.

I sit up. The blanket pools around me. There's a folded piece of paper on the pillow beside mine.

It's not stationery. It's torn from the back of one of his thick fantasy novels, the ones he pretends he doesn't read, the ragged edge still attached. His handwriting is surprisingly neat. Dense, square letters pressed hard into the paper with what looks like a carpenter's pencil.

Sabine,

Last night confirmed what I already knew. Being near me puts you in danger. The hit is still active. More will come. They won't stop because I eliminated six of them. They'll send twelve next time, or twenty, and next time you might not be standing in the doorway with pepper spray. Next time you might be asleep in this bed.

I've contacted the DMI and invoked a Penalized Severance. I told them I violated the cohabitation terms. The prison time and the magical backlash are mine, not yours. I made sure of that. You'll be free of the bond within the week, without having to wait the ninety days.

Don't look for me. Don't trace anything. Don't use your forensic accounting skills to find my accounts or my contacts or my safe houses because I know you can and I know you will and I am asking you, for once in your stubborn, brilliant, beautiful life, to leave something alone.

The Snarbo's food is under the sink. He eats twice a day. He likes it when you scratch behind his third eye.

You deserve a safe, quiet life with someone who doesn't get death warrants delivered to your door. I'm sorry I can't be that person. I'm sorry about your window. I'm sorry about all of it.

Except last night. I will never be sorry about last night.

J.

I read it twice. Three times. The carpenter's pencil smudges slightly under my thumb where I grip the paper too hard. The Snarbo appears in the bedroom doorway, all eyes blinking in staggered sequence, and tilts his lumpy head at me as a multi-eyed supernatural beast is recognizably, unmistakably worried.

I look at the folded note. I look at Rule Number Seven, still pinned to the refrigerator in accusatory magenta, visible through the open bedroom door. I look at the neat stack of my folded clothes, placed with the same devastating gentleness he used to remove them.

CHAPTER 12

JAGGER

The floor of my office is concrete. I know this because I have been lying on it for approximately fourteen hours, trembling as the first waves of magical backlash tear through my nervous system. Since I invoked the Penalized Severance, the bond's dissolution is funneling all the physiological punishment directly into my body, leaving her safe while my blood feels like it's turning to battery acid.

There is a sleeping bag between my body and the concrete, but my feet hang off the end by about ten inches, and my shoulders compress the padding flat. Every muscle spasm from the severance fever grinds my bones against the floor.

I don't move. I deserve the agony. I deserve the concrete.

The office is a single room above a shuttered pawn shop in the Thornwall District, the part of the city where the streetlights flicker in patterns that suggest they are communicating with each other about the violence they witness nightly. The window is cracked. Not broken, cracked, a single fracture line running diagonally from the lower left corner to the upper right, held together with packing tape I applied six months ago and haven't replaced because replacing things requires caring about the space you occupy, and I have never cared about this space. It is a place to store weapons and receive contracts. Nothing more.

Rain drips through a gap in the window frame and collects in a coffee mug on the sill. The mug has the logo of a bail bonds company on it. The bail bonds company went out of business three years ago after its owner was eaten by a Wendigo. I kept the mug. I don't know why.

The Snarbo is not here. The Snarbo is with her. This is the correct arrangement. The Snarbo deserves a warm apartment with a colored organizational systems and someone who will scratch behind his third eye on a reliable schedule. The Snarbo does not deserve this concrete floor, this cracked window, this mug that catches rain from a gap I will never fix because fixing things is something I apparently only do when a five-foot-three woman is acknowledging me with her lips slightly parted and her eyes tracking the movement of my shoulder blades.

I lower my face into the sleeping bag. It smells like canvas and gun oil. Twelve hours ago, everything smelled like her. Coconut shampoo and that specific clean warmth of freshly laundered cotton sheets, the faint sweetness of whatever lotion she puts on her hands before bed. I had buried my face in the curve of her neck and breathed so deep my lungs ached, trying to store the scent somewhere permanent, somewhere the concrete and the gun oil and the lonely stink of this office couldn't reach.

It's fading already.

I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling. There is a water stain directly above me shaped vaguely like a spreadsheet. I am losing my mind.

The note was the right call. The note was precise. The note communicated my position clearly and left no room for negotiation or counter-argument, which is important because Sabine Lin could negotiate a starving wolf into a vegetarian diet if you gave her enough color-organized index cards and a sufficiently stern expression. The note was strategic. The note was final.