Page 9 of Tusks And Conditions

She's not impressed. She's not touched by my attempt to provide for her. She's horrified, disgusted, and possibly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and it's entirely my fault for failing to consider that humans might have different breakfast traditions than Orcs.

"I'm sorry," I say quietly, and I mean it more than I've meant anything in a long time. "I didn't think. I just wanted to... I wanted to show you that I could take care of you. That even though this situation is strange and unwanted, you wouldn't go hungry or be neglected while we're forced to live together."

Sabine's expression shifts, the horror softening into something more complicated, and she lowers her hand from her mouth slowly. Her eyes meet mine, and for a long moment, neither of us speaks. Meatball peeks out from behind my legs, his tentacles still curled tight with anxiety, and the morning light catches the faint glow of my runes, betraying the depth of my embarrassment.

"That's..." Sabine pauses, seeming to struggle for words. "That's actually... surprisingly thoughtful. In a deeply horrifying and completely impractical way."

"I can learn to make oatmeal."

"Can you?"

"How hard can it be?"

She laughs, a short, startled sound that seems to surprise her as much as it surprises me. "Okay. Okay, fine. You clean up the... the meat situation... and I'll show you how to make oatmeal. We can compromise. That's what people who are forced to live together for ninety days do, right? They compromise."

The relief that floods through me is almost embarrassing in its intensity. "I can compromise. I'm very good at adapting to new situations."

"The last twelve hours suggest otherwise, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt."

She moves past me to retrieve cleaning supplies from beneath the sink, and I begin carefully repacking the meat into its containers, trying to minimize the spread of blood across her precious countertops. Meatball ventures out from behind my legs to investigate, his tentacles reaching toward the nearest blood sausage, and I push him away gently while Sabine isn't looking.

We work in silence for several minutes, her scrubbing at the marble with a focus and intensity that borders on obsessive, me wrapping the meat in fresh cloth and storing it in the back of her refrigerator where she hopefully won't have to look at it. By the time the counters are clean—or at least clean enough to satisfy her standards—the kitchen smells of lemon cleaning solution rather than raw meat, and Sabine's shoulders have lost some of their rigid tension.

"Oatmeal," she says, pulling a container of oats from her carefully organized pantry. "Lesson one."

The next thirty minutes pass in something approaching domestic peace. Sabine walks me through her precise oatmeal-making routine, explaining the importance of water temperature and stirring technique and the exact ratio of oats to liquid that produces optimal consistency. I listen with a focus I usually reserve for tracking dangerous fugitives, committing every detail to memory, determined to get this right even if I fail at everything else. Meatball curls up in the corner, watching us with his many eyes, and the morning sunlight fills the kitchen with warmth that seeps into my bones and makes me feel, for just a moment, like this might actually be okay.

The oatmeal turns out reasonably well, if slightly lumpy. Sabine doesn't complain, though, just adds her precisely measured brown sugar and berries and oat milk, and we sit across from each other at her small dining table, eating in companionable silence while Meatball makes hopeful gurgling sounds at our feet.

It's peaceful. It's domestic. It's nothing like my usual mornings, which tend to involve cold rations eaten on the move and the constant vigilance of a man who has made many dangerous enemies.

Which is why I'm completely unprepared when the living room window explodes inward.

Glass showers across Sabine's beige carpet, and a figure tumbles through the shattered frame, massive and snarling and covered in familiar tattoos that mark him as a member of the Bloodfang Syndicate. He hits the ground in a roll, coming up with a serrated blade in each hand and murder in his yellow eyes, and his gaze locks onto me with the intensity of a predator who has finally cornered his prey.

"Ironjaw," he growls. "You took my brother. Now I take your mate."

CHAPTER 5

SABINE

The world fractures into pure chaos, and my body freezes in the worst possible way—spoon halfway to my mouth, oatmeal dripping back into the bowl, brain screaming at my limbs to move while they stubbornly refuse to cooperate. Glass cascades across my carefully vacuumed carpet like deadly confetti, and the creature that just crashed through my window is already lunging toward the dining table with those horrible serrated blades catching the morning light in ways that make my stomach lurch violently.

I don't even have time to scream before Jagger moves.

He's across the room in a blur of grey skin and coiled muscle, his massive body inserting itself between me and the attacker with a speed that shouldn't be possible for someone his size. The impact of their collision sends shockwaves through the floorboards, rattling my carefully arranged shelf of alphabetized fiction and sending Meatball skittering under the couch with a terrified warble. Jagger's arm sweeps out, catching one of those wicked blades on his forearm guard, and the sound of metal on reinforced leather cracks through my apartment like a gunshot. The attacker—another Orc, I realize distantly, though smaller than Jagger and covered in different tattoos that swirl across his skin like angry red serpents—snarls something in a guttural language I don't understand, but Jagger doesn't bother responding with words.

His fist connects with the attacker's jaw in a devastating uppercut that lifts the smaller Orc completely off his feet, and I watch in horrified fascination as the intruder's head snaps back at an angle that would have broken a human neck. The blades clatter to my floor, gouging the hardwood I just had refinished last spring, and before the attacker can recover, Jagger grabs him by the throat and slams him down onto my coffee table with enough force to shatter the tempered glass surface into a thousand glittering pieces.

Five seconds. The entire fight lasts maybe five seconds, and by the end of it, the attacker is unconscious on my destroyed coffee table, bleeding onto the fragments of what used to be a perfectly acceptable piece of furniture from IKEA, while Jagger stands over him breathing hard, his runes pulsing with angry amber light that illuminates the sharp planes of his face.

My brain finally catches up with my body, and I lower my spoon back into my oatmeal bowl with trembling fingers.

"Sabine." Jagger turns to face me, his expression shifting from murderous rage to something approaching concern, and he steps over the unconscious Orc like the body is merely an inconvenient piece of furniture. "Are you hurt? Did any of the glass⁠—"

"My window."

The words come out flat, hollow, completely disconnected from the terror still singing through my nervous system. I'm looking past him now, staring at the gaping wound in my living room wall where my perfectly functional double-paned window used to be. Cold air rushes in, carrying the smell of exhaust and autumn leaves and someone's burnt toast from the apartment below, and I watch in numb horror as a pigeon lands on the jagged edge of the remaining glass, cocking its head at me like it's considering whether to make itself at home.