Page 37 of Tusks And Conditions

Sabine blinks. Her thumbs go still.

"That was my life. That has been my life for eleven years. Before that, worse. Before that, cage fights in the Undercity for rent money, and before that, running packages for people who would have slit my throat for a late delivery." I set my palms flat against the table, matching her earlier posture. The wood creaks. "I am very good at violence. I am exceptional at it. My name on a warrant makes people surrender before I arrive. I have built an entire reputation on being the thing that walks in when hope walks out."

A siren wails somewhere outside. Three blocks away. Heading south. My ears track it automatically, a reflex I cannot shut off. Probably never will.

"And I am so tired."

The kitchen light hums. The oatmeal pot sits in the sink. Her lavender soap dispenser catches a thin bar of afternoon sun through the window I repaired with my own hands.

"I am tired of concrete floors and brown drips and cold tin meals. I am tired of sleeping with a blade under my pillow and checking exit routes before I sit down in a restaurant. I am tired of every person I meet calculating whether I am about to hurt them." I swallow. The silver piercing in my tusk clicks against my lower teeth. "I came here because I had no choice. I stayed because you handed me a list of rules and you organized my ammunition and you burned oatmeal at six in the morning and sang off-key while you did it, and for the first time in eleven years I slept through the entire night without waking up to check the door."

Her eyes are glassy. She unfolds her hands, then quickly folds them again.

"That first morning. The raw meat." A rough sound escapes my throat. Almost a laugh. "You looked at my Orcish breakfast spread like I had committed a felony against your kitchen, and then you got a second bowl and made me oatmeal. Nobody has made me food since the last time I saw my mother, years ago."

Sabine's lower lip disappears between her teeth.

"Ninety days. That was the sentence. I have spent every single one of those days pretending I was counting down, and I was counting, Sabine, but not toward the end. I was counting what I had. Mornings where you handed me coffee in that ridiculous mug with the cartoon cat. Evenings where you read your audit reports on one end of the couch and I read my book on the other and neither of us said a word for two hours and it was the best silence I have ever sat in."

I push the annulment papers another inch away.

"I left because I am dangerous. That part is true. People will come for me again. My world is ugly and it follows me and it crashed through your window and nearly touched you, and that thought alone makes my vision go dark around the edges." My hands curl against the table. My forearm runes pulse a slow, warning amber. "But I came back because you dragged me out of a bar by my ear, and you were not afraid of me. You were angry at me. And that is not the same thing."

She opens her mouth.

I hold up one hand.

"I am not asking you to keep me. I am asking you not to sign those papers today. Give me the ninety days we were promised. All of them. Let me earn the right to sit at this table."

The kitchen light flickers once. The Snarbo peeks one eye out from under the couch.

Sabine stares at the annulment papers at the table's edge, then back at me, and her chin lifts to that angle again. The calculated one. The immovable one.

"You owe me a new window deposit."

The pen hits the table with a plastic clatter that bounces off the kitchen walls. Sabine pushes back from her chair, stands, and points down the hallway toward the bedroom with the same rigid authority she once aimed at a DMI clerk who tried to shortchange her on filing receipts.

"Prove it."

My brain stalls.

"The bedroom. Now."

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again. No sound comes out. Eleven years of staring down fugitives and crime lords and one particularly unhinged warlock who threw acid beetles at my face, and a five-foot-five accountant in a cream cardigan just emptied every word from my skull.

She crosses her arms. "Are you coming or not?"

I stand. The chair scrapes back. The Snarbo bolts fully under the couch and refuses to surface. Wise.

Sabine is already halfway down the hall, her comfortable flats clicking against the hardwood with the tempo of someone marching into a board meeting she intends to dominate. I follow. My boots make the floor creak in protest with every step. The hallway is narrow enough that my shoulders brush both walls, catching on the small framed print of a lakeside cottage she bought at a flea market three Sundays ago. I straighten it without breaking stride.

She pushes open the bedroom door. Her pastel duvet is pulled tight with hospital corners. The decorative pillows are arranged in descending size order, largest against the headboard, smallest in front. A single lavender candle is on the nightstand next to her reading glasses and a mechanical pencil.

And on the dresser, folded in a precise square, sits my black t-shirt. The one I slept in. The one I left behind when I wrote that note and walked out like a coward. She washed it. She folded it. She kept it on her dresser next to a ceramic dish that holds her earrings.

The air leaves my lungs.

Sabine stands at the foot of the bed, arms still crossed, chin at that devastating angle.