Page 29 of Tusks And Conditions

The note was the hardest thing I have ever written, and I once had to compose a formal apology to the Troll King of the Eastern Marshes after accidentally decapitating his favorite decorative gargoyle during a rooftop chase, so the bar for difficult correspondence in my life is not low.

I sit up. The sleeping bag bunches around me. The room is cold. Not the kind of cold that her apartment was when I first walked in, that sterile, air-conditioned precision calibrated to exactly sixty-eight degrees. This cold is structural. It comes from thin walls and bad insulation and the fundamental indifference of a building that knows its occupant won't complain.

My phone lies on the floor beside me, dark. I turned it off six hours ago because I kept checking it. Not for messages from her, I told myself. For work. Bounty alerts. Contract updates. Professional communications. But my thumb kept navigating to the message thread with the DMI case officer, where Sabine's contact information is listed as my registered bond-mate, and I would stare at her phone number until my vision blurred and then turn the screen off and wait eleven minutes and do it again.

So I powered the phone down entirely. Pulled the battery. Discipline.

I pick the phone up now and reassemble it with hands that are, I notice with clinical detachment, shaking violently from the onset of the magical seizures. The screen boots. Three missed calls from an unknown number. No voicemails. No texts. This is what I wanted. This is the correct outcome.

I stand. The ceiling is too low. Every ceiling in my life is too low except the one in her apartment, which had those slightly vaulted ceilings that she complained about because they were "impossible to dust properly" but which gave me exactly enough clearance to stand at full height without hunching. I hunch now, crossing to the metal desk shoved against the far wall, and open the top drawer. Inside, stacked in no particular order because I am a person who stores important documents the way a raccoon stores garbage, are bounty contracts. Active warrants. Outstanding writs of supernatural enforcement.

I flip through them. The paper is rough, official, stamped with the seals of various enforcement agencies and private clients. Each one represents a target. A creature or person who has violated enough laws, natural and supernatural, to earn a price on their head. Each one represents danger, violence, the high probability of grievous bodily harm to both hunter and hunted.

Each one represents exactly what I need right now. Something loud enough, brutal enough, and consuming enough to drown out the memory of the way she whispered my name last night, not Ironjaw, not "the Orc," but Jagger, soft and breathless against my collarbone, her fingers tracing the lines of the rune on my sternum that she said looked like a circuit board, and the sound of my own name in her mouth had undone something in me that I am not sure can be redone.

I need the hardest job in this pile.

My fingers find it near the bottom. A black-bordered contract, which in bounty hunter parlance means the target is classified as an extreme threat. The kind of job that pays six figures because the survival rate for the hunter is roughly coin-flip odds. The target is a rogue Skinwalker operating out of the old mill district, three confirmed kills in the last month, and the enforcement agencies have given up sending their own people because the last two teams they dispatched came back in bags. Plural bags. Per person.

I read the contract details. The Skinwalker has a pattern. Nocturnal. Territorial. Fond of industrial spaces with multiple exits. The kind of target that requires total focus, zero distraction, and a willingness to accept that you might not walk out of the building when it's done. Six months ago, I would have taken this contract before breakfast and had the Skinwalker in restraints by lunch. Six months ago, I didn't have anything to come home to.

I also didn't have anything to lose.

I fold the contract and shove it into the inside pocket of my chest plate. I gear up with the mechanical efficiency of repetition, strapping on armored leather, checking blades, loading the heavy crossbow bolts into their case. The motions are familiar. Soothing. This is what I am. Not the person who fixes windows shirtless while a beautiful woman watches. Not the person who eats oatmeal at a kitchen island and discusses the merits of color-coded filing systems.

I am a bounty hunter. I track dangerous things and I bring them in or I put them down, and I do this alone because being alone is the only configuration that doesn't result in somebody I care about getting hurt.

My hand finds the door handle. I pause. There is a fantasy novel on the desk, half-read, the spine cracked at page 347. I left it here weeks ago when I moved into Sabine's apartment. The bookmark is a receipt from the noodle place downstairs. I should take it with me. Something to read during surveillance hours.

I leave it. The hero was about to confess his feelings to the innkeeper's daughter in chapter twenty-six, and I cannot handle fictional emotional vulnerability right now.

The bar is called The Quartered Coin, and it sits in a basement beneath a laundromat that hasn't functioned since the Reagan administration. You enter through a service door in the alley, down a set of iron stairs that groan under any weight above two hundred pounds, which means they scream under mine. The interior is dark, low-ceilinged, and smells like stale mead and regret. It is the kind of establishment where the bartender keeps a loaded shotgun under the counter not as a precaution but as a decorative choice that communicates the general vibe.

This is where bounty hunters come to drink, brag, and pick up contracts that are too dirty, too dangerous, or too legally ambiguous for the official boards. I know every face in this room. The scarred Dwarf running a whetbrick over a short sword in the corner booth. The pair of Elven twins who specialize in tracking fae criminals and who dress identically to confuse their targets. The massive Troll at the bar who goes by Gutspill and whose name is, unfortunately, descriptive of his preferred combat technique.

I take a seat at the far end of the bar. The stool is reinforced steel, one of two in the establishment built to support Orc-class weight. I signal the bartender, a weathered Goblin woman named Picks who has been pouring drinks here since before I started hunting, and she slides a tankard of black ale down the bar without a word. She takes one look at my face and adds a second tankard immediately.

"You look like hammered shit, Ironjaw."

"Thank you."

"No, I mean it." She leans both elbows on the bar, her yellowed eyes narrowing with an assessment that is uncomfortably perceptive. "Your runes are bleeding grey, and you're sweating through your leathers. That's severance backlash. What the hell did you do?"

I drain half the first tankard in a single pull. The ale is warm and bitter and nothing like the oatmeal with brown sugar and precisely sliced bananas that Sabine made on the third morning, the one where she'd looked up at me and said, "I suppose you can stay for breakfast since you're already here," as if she hadn't already set a second bowl on the counter. I put the tankard down.

"I need a contract. Something big. Tonight."

Picks gives me the look that bartenders in establishments like this have perfected over centuries, the one that says I have seen a thousand hunters walk through that door trying to outrun something, and the ones running fastest are always running from something soft. She doesn't say any of this. She dries a glass.

"Board's on the back wall. Couple new postings. There's a Skinwalker job that's been sitting there for weeks because nobody's stupid enough to take it."

"I'll take it."

"You didn't let me finish. Nobody's stupid enough to take it sober."

I pull the contract from my chest plate and flatten it on the bar. "Already have the paperwork. I need background intel. Anything your regulars have heard about the mill district activity."

Picks opens her mouth to respond, but her eyes flick to something over my shoulder and her eyebrows climb so high they disappear beneath the brim of her cap. The entire bar has gone quiet. Not the gradual, conversational lull of a room losing interest. The sudden, complete silence of a room full of professional predators recognizing a disturbance.