Page 45 of Tusks And Conditions

She doesn't look up from the legal pad. "I told Roger I had a family emergency."

Family.

The rune over my heart flickers once. Gold, not amber. She doesn't notice. She's already flipped to a new page and started a numbered action list.

Across the street, my life burns to the foundation. Twelve years of solitary, violent work collapsing into ash and ruin.

Beside me, Sabine writes item number four on her list: Contact Bounty Licensing Board re: temporary operational variance.

She underlines it twice.

The fire crew pulls back another twenty feet. The troll, a grey-skinned bruiser with two missing fingers on his left hand and the weary posture of someone who has seen too many arson calls this month, shakes his massive head at the structure. Done. Whatever the hoses are doing now is just courtesy. Keeping the neighboring buildings from catching. My office is past saving.

Sabine writes item number seven on her list. Something about filing deadlines. Her pen moves in precise, efficient strokes. No wasted motion.

The last standing wall buckles.

The interior staircase, the one with the third step that groaned like a wounded animal every time I climbed it, folds into the inferno. Sparks scatter. A chunk of masonry hits the sidewalk thirty feet away, and a dwarf firefighter kicks it into the gutter without breaking stride.

I wait for the grief.

I stand there on the cracked sidewalk with smoke in my lungs and ash drifting onto my shoulders, and I wait for the loss to gut me. For that particular hollow ache that comes when the thing you built collapses. I know that feeling. Felt it when my first partner caught a cursed bolt in the neck during a Shadowvale extraction. Felt it when my clan refused to speak my name after I chose bounty work over military service.

I wait.

Nothing comes.

Not nothing. Something comes, but it is the wrong thing entirely. A loosening in the muscles between my shoulder blades that have been knotted tight for over a decade. The sensation of a strap being cut.

Patience is in there. My crossbow. Four months of Orcish smithwork. I have killed seventeen targets with that weapon and incapacitated over sixty. The stock was carved from ironwood and inlaid with bone. It fit my hand like it was grown there.

I do not miss it.

The case files. Hundreds of them. Names, locations, networks, debts. The entire architecture of my professional life rendered down to carbon and memory. Contacts I cultivated through years of favors and threats and careful, patient trust-building.

Gone. All of it. Fine.

Fine.

Better than fine.

Sabine taps her pen against the legal pad. "I'm going to need your bounty license number for the variance application. Is it the same number on your tax forms?"

"Probably."

"Probably." She circles something on her list. Hard. "You filed three years of returns using 'probably' as your operative framework, and it shows."

"Sabine."

"What?"

"I don't want the variance."

Her pen stops. She looks up from the legal pad. Smoke drifts between us, a thin grey veil, and through it her dark eyes are sharp and searching.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean I don't want a temporary operational variance. I don't want to file for replacement permits. I don't want to contact the Licensing Board."