22. Gunnar
Gunnar
I have broken more doors than any man alive, and nobody has ever once made me replace one.
Also, I didn’t even break this one. Rayner broke this one. And they’re making me go shopping anyway.
Shopping.
They can’t be serious.
They are, and apparently I’m expected to participate.
We’re barely into the lobby when I see him. Leif, over by the front doors, looking like a man who didn’t spend the whole night outside.
Which is how I know he spent the whole night outside.
“We’re replacing her door,” Erik says.
“Good.” Leif’s already looking past us, toward the stairwell. “I’ve got her until you’re back.”
Brock’s the one who asks it. “You’re really going up there?”
Something crosses Leif’s face and is gone before I can make it out. His eyes flick to the box.
“Stairs,” he says.
“Commander of ásp Móra,” I say. “Undefeated in thirteen realms. Beaten by a box.”
“It’s a metal box with doors that close on purpose.” He’s already moving. “That’s a trap.”
“We already have one of those. She said so.”
Brock’s mouth does something he’d deny.
Erik doesn’t move. He’s got one hand on the front door and his whole head three floors up, and every one of us can see it.
“Erik.” Leif, from the second step. “I said I’ve got her.”
Erik’s jaw works once. Then he nods, and we watch Leif go up the stairs steady and unhurried, like a man reporting for a shift.
Chicago gets a parade.
Four of us, shoulder to shoulder on a sidewalk built for two, and the city notices.
Traffic slows. A jogger passes us twice, and the second lap wasn’t for cardio.
Two women outside a café stop mid-sentence and don’t pretend otherwise, which I respect.
A man in a suit stares long enough to clip a mailbox.
A kid stops dead on the sidewalk, looks up at Rayner like he’s a building, and says, “Are you guys superheroes?”
“Yes,” I tell him.
His mother hauls him off before I can take questions.
It’s unfortunate.
We make it half a block before a woman with a yoga mat steps directly into our path. Hand up, palm out, like she’s stopping traffic.
She’s not wrong.
We are the traffic.
“Okay. Sorry. Hi.” She’s talking to Rayner. Her eyes make the full trip up him and take their time coming back down. “I have to ask. What gym do you go to?”
Rayner blinks back from wherever he’s been all morning and stares at her long enough to make it everyone’s problem.
“I walk,” he says. Complete sincerity.
“You—” She recalculates. “You walk.”
“Long distances.”
“Is that, like… a program?”
“No.”
She waits for more but there is no more. Rayner’s already looking down the block, gone back to wherever he spends his time lately.
“I also walk,” I offer.
She does not look at me.
She looks at Brock instead, who hands her the smile he keeps for civilians, and she visibly forgets what day it is.
“Have a good one,” Brock says, and steps around her.
We leave her on the sidewalk holding her yoga mat like a life raft.
For the record, I was right there. Available. Tongue ring. Did I mention available?
The universe has no taste.
Erik doesn’t slow for any of it. He’s got a door to buy and a woman to get back to, and he sets a pace that says so.
The hardware store is a temple, and I mean that as a complaint.
It’s big enough to stable all four of us shifted, and every single thing in it is a version of another thing. There are forty-seven kinds of screws. I counted. Somewhere, someone decided this world needed forty-seven kinds of screws, and they say I’m insane.
An employee spots us coming through the doors, lifts his radio, and says, quiet, like the four of us can’t all hear him perfectly, “Dave. Front entrance.”
Dave never comes. Smart man, Dave.
Instead we get a kid in an orange vest, nineteen at the outside, who plants himself in our path with the courage of the recently trained. “You guys finding everything okay?”
“Doors,” Erik says.
“Doors. Yeah. Aisle eleven, I can show—”
Erik’s already moving. “Interior. Thirty-six by eighty. Prehung, right-hand swing.”
The kid double-times to keep up. “You, uh. You know your stuff.”
“It’s my door,” Erik says, which clears up nothing for anyone.
Nobody asks how he’s got it memorized. His door is her door — same building, same hallway, three years of walking past it. Of course he knows it to the quarter inch.
Rayner has said five words since we left the building, and a stranger with a yoga mat had to pull them out of him.
That’s wrong. Rayner’s the one who picks things up in places like this. He lets his curiosity get the best of him and asks so many questions the guys working usually kick us out. Today he’s just walking ten feet back, smiling at a shelf of paint like it’s in on something.
“You’re being weird,” I tell him. Somebody had to.
“I know.”
That’s it. That’s the whole answer.
“He woke up like that,” Brock offers.
“Smiling?”
“Smiling.”
I look at Rayner. Rayner smiles at me.
No way. Not investigating that. Some doors you don’t kick.
At aisle eleven the kid asks the question they must teach in training. “So what happened to the old one?”
Rayner shifts the door under his arm. “It lost an argument.”
The kid looks at him. Takes him in and decides no follow-up questions.
Smart kid.
The door Erik picks is beige and hollow and weighs less than my boots.
“Absolutely not.”
“It matches the building.”
“I’ve broken doors like this by leaning on them. Beautiful deserves a door that fights back. Solid core at least. Steel, if they—”
“It has to look like every other door in that hallway.”
He’s right, which is one of his worst qualities. I pull the solid core off the rack myself and dare anyone to say anything about it.
“Sir, we have carts—”
Rayner is already taking it from me and has the door under one arm like a magazine.
The kid’s eyes get bigger but he doesn’t comment.
On the way to hardware there’s an entire aisle of plants that aren’t real.
She’d hate it. Especially with… No.
No no.
I don’t know why I care.
I don’t care.
Done.
In the hinge aisle, Erik grabs the first box on the shelf. Brock’s already three shelves down with a different one in his hand, reading the back.
“Ball bearing,” he says. “Not those. Those will squeak in a few months.”
The kid checks the label over his shoulder. “…He’s right.”
“He’s always right,” I say. “It’s exhausting.”
Brock grins and I push him toward the lock aisle.
He lets me. He could plant his feet and I’d bounce off, and we both know it, but he goes where I put him — and my hand stays on his shoulder too long.
I know it. He knows it.
I take it back.
He doesn’t mention it. Brock not mentioning something is never free.
The lock aisle takes it out of me, personally.
There’s a wall of them. Deadbolts, chains, smart locks, latch guards, an entire armory of locks, and not one of them would stop me. I could get through the best lock on this wall with a shoulder and moderate intent.
“What is the point of a lock that wouldn’t stop me?”
“Most burglars aren’t you,” Brock says.
“Every burglar should be flattered by the comparison.”
He rolls his eyes, and I’m going to leave it alone.
You don’t have to earn every good thing.
It pops into my head. I don’t want it there but the thought doesn’t care.
Somebody wrote that to her. In careful handwriting on nice paper, somebody who’s been close enough, long enough, to know the exact thing she—
I pick up the biggest deadbolt they make and put it in the cart.
“That’s commercial grade,” the kid says. “Like, for pawn shops.”
“Perfect.”
The kid gets sent off for a longer strike plate, which buys us an aisle to ourselves, and Brock appears at my shoulder while Erik and Rayner are two rows over debating trim. He does that. Arrives without arriving.
“You saw something,” he says. Low. Just for me.
“I saw a box.”
“Gunnar.”
My name, in that voice, after this many years, is cheating.
“I saw three notes in that dragon box on her desk,” I say, “and a woman who doesn’t know why they matter.”
Brock goes still. All the way still, and I know he doesn’t like it as much as I do.
Not that I care.
Moving on.
“And why do they matter?”
He watches me. He’s about to say something true — I can feel it loading — so I grab the nearest thing off the shelf and hold it up between us.
“Do you think she’d want a doorbell that plays eighty songs?”
“Gunnar.”
“They make one that barks.”
He lets me go. He always lets me go. That’s the arrangement.
But I know this isn’t over.
On the way to the registers there’s a display of tiny doors. Doors for doors. I stop.
“What is this?”
Brock looks over. “Pet door.”
“For what pet? A mouse?”
“Cats, mostly.”
“Let me get this straight.” I point back toward the lock aisle. “They sell a wall of deadbolts, and then they sell you a hole to cut in the same door.”
“For the cat.”
“For the cat.” I look at the tiny door for a long moment. “So the cat outranks the deadbolt.”
“In hers? Absolutely. Ella has wanted a cat for as long as I’ve known her,” Erik says staring at one in particular.
“Noted.”
I definitely do not grab the one he was looking at.
The kid rings us up himself. We all look at Erik when the total appears. We didn’t plan on shopping. We didn’t bring currency. Good thing, too. He hands the kid a card made of plastic. We don’t have that kind of currency for Earth.
The receipt keeps printing. And printing.
“Big project?” the kid says.
“Repairs,” Erik says.
“Renovation,” Brock says.
“Apology,” Rayner says.
The kid nods like that helped, and hands me a receipt long enough to qualify as a legal document.
We leave with one door, three bags of hardware, and a deadbolt rated for banks.
Sounds right.
We left Leif alone with the fairy tale.
The man handles assassins, border disputes, and Vestry summons without blinking.
Surely he can handle Elara Dorne for an hour.
“So, Erik,” I say as we step out.
He glances at me and he already knows I’m going to say something he’d qualify as stupid.
“When were you going to tell Beautiful those notes came from you?”