Page 43 of Tusks And Conditions

"No overnight hunts. No cross-border pursuits. Home by seven." He says this while rummaging through his gear bag for clean clothes, like he is listing grocery items rather than completely restructuring his career.

"You'd do that?"

He pulls a black shirt over his head. Looks at me like I've asked whether gravity works.

"Sabine. I have eaten your eggs. I have slept in your bed. I have read three chapters of my book on your couch while you scratched behind my ear." A pause. "I am building a life in this apartment. The bounties will fit around it. Not the other way."

Something hot presses behind my eyes. I blink it back and take a very controlled sip of coffee.

"I'll draft a revised budget tonight. Dual income projections. We should discuss retirement fund allocations, given the lifespan issue."

"I accept your terms."

"I haven't stated terms yet."

"I accept them in advance."

I grab my bag. He grabs his weapons belt. We leave the apartment together, splitting at the lobby. He heads north toward the Flats, where his office sits above a pawnshop that exclusively sells haunted jewelry. I head south toward the firm.

At the corner I turn back. He's already standing on the sidewalk like a boulder in a stream, pedestrians parting around him without making eye contact. He raises one hand. I raise mine.

Then I walk to work.

I'm three spreadsheets into a quarterly report for an enchanted bakery chain when my phone buzzes Jagger's name. I pick up.

No greeting. No preamble. Just him, flat and controlled in the way that means the opposite of calm.

"My office is on fire."

I'm already standing. "What?"

"Korvan." The crime lord. The one whose accounts I gutted. "His people torched the building. My case files are inside. My equipment. Everything."

Through the phone, sirens. The crack of something structural giving way.

"Where are you right now?"

"Across the street. Watching it burn."

CHAPTER 16

JAGGER

The line goes dead. I pocket the phone and stare at what used to be my office.

Flames eat through the second-story windows with the lazy confidence of something that knows it has already won. The pawnshop below is gutted. Haunted rings and cursed bracelets pop and shriek in the heat, sending tiny green sparks spiraling into the morning air like furious fireflies. Glass shatters. The fire crew from Station 14, a mixed unit of dwarves and one very tired-looking troll, aims their hoses at the neighboring buildings. Containment, not rescue. They've already written off the structure.

My structure.

Twelve years of case files. Contact networks scrawled on index cards because I don't trust digital storage. Three sets of custom-forged restraints. My crossbow, Patience, which took an Orcish weaponsmith four months to balance for my grip. A signed first edition of The Siege of Thornwall that I found in a dead man's apartment and kept because nobody else wanted it.

Smoke rolls across the street and stings my eyes. My forearms pulse hot, a low amber glow, rage sitting just beneath my ribs like a swallowed coal.

Korvan.

Bankrupt, humiliated, stripped of his laundering network by a five-foot-five accountant with a forensic eye and no tolerance for sloppy bookkeeping. So he does what small, vicious men do when the money dries up. He burns something.

A beam collapses inside. The roof sags inward like a punched stomach. Two of the dwarven firefighters swear in Khuzdul and pull their line back.