Page 31 of Tusks And Conditions

She's right. About all of it. The probability modeling, the risk assessment, the infuriating part. She sat across from me at her kitchen island with our takeout containers between us and walked me through the actuarial tables she'd pulled up on her laptop.

And then I left. Because that feeling, that vast and terrifying tenderness, is exactly the kind of thing that gets people killed in my line of work. Not me. Her. The targets who come through windows. The crime lords who send death warrants. The long, ugly list of enemies I've accumulated over fifteen years of hunting, every one of whom would see a small, perfect, cream-blazer-wearing accountant and recognize immediately that she is the most efficient weapon anyone could ever deploy against me.

"You should not have come here." I say it and hate the sound of it, hate the way it lands in the small space between us, flat and heavy and untrue in every way that matters. "The Thornwall District is not safe."

"My apartment isn't safe either, apparently, since people keep crashing through the window and crime lords send couriers to the door." She steps closer. Close enough that I can smell her. Coconut shampoo. The clean cotton warmth. And beneath it, something new, something I catalogued last night and have been trying unsuccessfully to scrub from my memory for fourteen hours, the specific salt-sweet scent of her skin when it's warm and flushed and pressed against mine. "At least when you were there, I had a six-foot-six Orc between me and the window. Now I have a Snarbo who drools on the couch and can't figure out how to open the treat jar."

"The treat jar has a childproof lid. It requires opposable thumbs and a basic understanding of rotational mechanics."

"Jagger." She says my name the way she said it last night. Not Ironjaw. Not the bounty hunter. Just Jagger, and the sound of it in this grim, stale bar is so violently incongruent my skin flare hot enough to warm the leather over them, and I see her eyes drop to the glow visible at my collar and widen slightly. "Stop deflecting."

I could tell her the truth. I could open my mouth and explain that I left because the alternative is staying, and staying means she becomes the permanent, central, load-bearing structure of my entire existence, and load-bearing structures are the first things that enemies target because bringing them down collapses everything built on top of them. I could explain that I have watched partners die. Not romantic partners, professional ones, hunters who worked in pairs and got sloppy with their affection and gave the darkness something to leverage. I could explain that the note was not cowardice but strategy, a controlled demolition of something beautiful before the uncontrolled version could destroy her.

But she is standing in front of me with red-rimmed eyes and shaking hands and my crumpled note in her fist, and she tracked me across the city using property tax records and a noodle vendor, and she descended a dangerous staircase in a dangerous neighborhood to walk into a bar full of supernatural mercenaries wearing a cream blazer, and the truth is that none of my reasons matter because they are built on a foundation that I now realize is fundamentally unsound.

The foundation is the assumption that leaving protects her. But the targets will still come through windows. The crime lords will still send couriers. The DMI bond is still active, which means she is still legally, magically, and bureaucratically linked to dangerous bounty hunter in the city whether I am sleeping on her floor or on a concrete slab in the Thornwall District. My absence doesn't remove the danger. It just removes the six-foot-six barrier between her and the window.

She figured this out before I did. She probably figured it out within ten minutes of reading the note, because she is an accountant and accountants understand that removing one variable from a risk equation does not eliminate the risk if the remaining variables are unchanged. She probably sat at the kitchen island and ran the numbers and arrived at the obvious conclusion and then got furious, not just at my departure but at the mathematical illiteracy of it, and there is nothing that offends Sabine Lin more deeply than bad math.

"The survival probability on that contract." She reaches past me, and I feel the brush of her blazer against my forearm, featherlight and devastating, as she picks up the black-bordered paper from the bar. She folds it with the precise, deliberate motions of someone handling a document they intend to file in a very specific location, and then she slides it into her structured leather work bag between what appears to be a neatly tabbed binder and a ziplock bag of emergency almonds. "Is now zero percent. Because you are not taking it."

"Sabine..."

"You are coming home." She says home the way other people say checkmate, with the quiet finality of someone who has already won and is simply informing the losing party of the outcome. "You are coming home, and you are going to explain to me, in detail, using complete sentences and not a three-line note, exactly why you thought it was acceptable to leave, and then I am going to explain to you, using actuarial tables and possibly a whiteboard, exactly why your risk assessment was flawed, and then we are going to discuss the remaining eighty-seven days of our cohabitation period like adults."

Picks sets a glass of water on the bar in front of Sabine. Sabine looks at it, looks at Picks, and nods once in polite acknowledgment. She does not drink it. Her eyes haven't left my face.

The bar is still silent. Every hunter in the room is regarding us with the rapt attention of professionals witnessing something they don't entirely understand but recognize as significant, the way a predator recognizes the shift in the wind that means the season is changing.

I look down at her. She looks up at me. The size difference is the same as it always has been, almost a foot and a half of vertical distance between us plus roughly double her body weight in raw mass, and yet I have never felt smaller than I do in this moment, sitting on this reinforced steel stool with my weapons strapped to my body and my armor cinched tight, being dismantled syllable by syllable by a woman who weighs a hundred and fifteen pounds and brought emergency almonds to a bounty hunter bar.

"You picked the apartment lock." It's the only thing I can think to say. Not I'm sorry, not I love you, not you are the first person in my entire life who has ever come looking for me, but a flat observation about her unexpected proficiency with lock-picking, which was a mechanical bypass to the ward glyph, because I am emotionally stunted and apparently process overwhelming feeling by fixating on logistical details.

"YouTube tutorial. It took eleven minutes." She pauses. "Your lock is terrible. We're upgrading it."

We're.

CHAPTER 13

SABINE

The bar smells like iron filings and wet leather and something underneath both of those things that is either ancient whiskey or recent blood. Possibly both. The lighting looks like a bruise, all yellowed and dim, and every surface my eyes land on has been scratched or dented or carved into by something with claws. The floor is sticky under my soaked, neutral-toned flats. Rainwater drips from the hem of my blazer.

I have been composing this speech for the entire cab ride from my apartment to the Thornwall District, refining it during the seven-block walk through a torrential downpour from where the cab driver refused to drive any further, and polishing it to a razor edge during the forty-five seconds it took me to locate Jagger Ironjaw hunched over this bar like a gargoyle someone forgot to mount on a building.

"You left a note. You left a note. On my kitchen island. Weighted down with a coffee mug. Like you were canceling a dentist appointment."

Jagger opens his mouth.

"No." I hold up one finger. One single finger, and his jaw closes.The apex predator, silenced by an index finger. Good. "You don't get to talk yet. You get to talk when I am finished, and I am not finished, because I have a list."

I pull the list from my bag. It is handwritten on my firm's letterhead because I couldn't find printer paper at three in the morning and I was not about to let a formatting issue delay this confrontation.

"Item one." I smooth the paper against the bar. A drop of something unidentifiable soaks into the corner. I press on. "DMI Form 8B, Section 14, Subsection C, clearly states that both bonded parties must maintain continuous cohabitation at the registered address for the full ninety-day assessment period. Continuous. Not three days. Not three days and a sticky note. Ninety. Instead, you triggered a Penalized Severance to take the magical backlash and a decade in supernatural prison yourself—which is exactly the kind of self-sacrificing idiocy I do not accept from my roommates."

Someone at a back table coughs. It might be a laugh. I don't turn around.

"Item two." My finger drags down the page. "Your unilateral departure constitutes a breach of the verbal agreement we established on Day One, specifically Ground Rule Number Three on the green index card, which states, and I quote, 'Neither party will make major decisions affecting the shared living arrangement without a minimum twenty-four-hour discussion period.' You gave me zero hours. You gave me a mug."