18. Dash #3
No one walks away from a contract guild with a perfect record and a reputation worth its weight in gold.
Grimjaw doesn't allow it. The investment is too great.
The training, the contacts, the years of built loyalty and shared blood debts.
A mercenary who leaves is a mercenary who takes guild secrets with him, and Grimjaw has exactly one method for settling that kind of account.
Trial by combat.
"I have to fight him."
She doesn't speak for three full seconds. The van hums over a seam in the highway.
"Fight him how?"
"Bare hands. Stone circle. First one to yield or die."
"YIELD OR DIE?"
"It's mostly ceremonial."
"THE DYING PART IS CEREMONIAL?"
"The yielding part. Nobody yields. That's the ceremonial aspect."
She slams both palms against the wheel. The horn blares across three lanes. A pixie on a racing broom swerves and curses at them in Sylvan.
"When?"
"I have to formally submit my resignation by sundown tomorrow. The fight happens at dawn the day after."
Her jaw works. Her hands grip the wheel at ten and two, flour-dusted knuckles bone-white, and the speedometer climbs past seventy. Seventy-five. Eighty.
"Fine."
"Fine?"
"I'm coming."
"Magnolia—"
"I didn't drive a van into a rock crawler and ruin a twenty-dollar bag of King Arthur bread flour to watch you get killed in a parking lot by your middle manager."
"Stone circle. Not a parking lot. And Grimjaw is more of a CEO."
She takes the city exit at eighty-five. The van catches air over a pothole. Sheet pans crash in the back like a cymbal section falling down stairs.
"Monday. You start Monday. So whatever you need to punch between now and then, punch it fast."
Her hand leaves the wheel. Finds my knee. Squeezes once. Hard.
Baker's hands.
I cover her fingers with mine. My scarred, bandaged, lavender-scented hand over her small, flour-dusted, iron-gripped one.
Monday. I start Monday.
I just have to survive Sunday first.
The dawn air in the canyon tastes of copper and dust. Around us, fifty mercenaries of the Iron Fang form a living wall, their silence heavier than the stone circle beneath my boots.
Grimjaw stands at the center. Seven feet and two inches of ancient, immovable muscle, his face a ruin of old wars and his iron-plated jaw locked in a permanent sneer.
He doesn't look at the bakery van idling just outside the perimeter.
He only looks at me, calculating the exact location of my cracked ribs and sutured thigh.
"No one walks away, Roark," Grimjaw rumbles, rolling his massive shoulders. "You die in the guild, or you die in the dirt."
He lunges before the echoes of his voice fade.
Despite his size, he moves with terrifying speed.
His fist connects with my bad shoulder, and white-hot pain arcs down my spine as my newly reduced joint screams in protest. I stagger back, tasting green blood, but duck under his follow-up hook and drive my good shoulder into his midsection.
Hitting him feels like tackling a bank vault, but it forces him back a step.
The fight strips down to primal math: bone against bone, momentum against mass. Grimjaw fights with decades of ruthless experience, targeting every fresh wound the rock crawler left me. He lands a knee to my cracked ribs that drives the breath from my lungs, sending me down hard on the granite.
Grimjaw steps back, his eyes narrowing. "You're weak, Roark," he spits, signaling to his second-in-command.
The Orc tosses Grimjaw a massive broadsword.
A murmur ripples through the mercenaries—a blatant violation of the bare-hands rite—but no one intervenes.
Grimjaw raises the blade high, ready to cleave me in two.
But as my vision swims, I catch a flash of midnight blue beyond the mercenary ring. The van. Sugar & Slag.
I am not dying in the dirt. I have a delivery route on Monday.
I roll to my feet just as the blade comes down.
I catch the flat of the broadsword between my bare palms, the sheer force driving me back to my knees.
The metal groans. With a roar that tears my throat, I twist my entire body, using the leverage of my stance and every ounce of remaining Orcish strength.
The broadsword snaps in two with a sound like a gunshot.
The sudden release of tension throws Grimjaw off balance.
Before he can recover, I sweep his planted leg and drive him onto his back.
I snatch the broken half of his own blade and press the jagged edge against his throat, pinning him to the blood-slicked stone.
My lungs burn with every breath. Grimjaw looks up at me, chest heaving, and sees exactly what the rock crawler saw. A man who has something to go home to.
"You yield?" I ask, my voice echoing off the canyon walls.
Grimjaw stares at the broken blade, then drops his head back against the granite. "I yield," the old Orc rumbles, spitting a tooth onto the stone. "The contract is broken. You are free."
I toss the shattered steel aside and rise. The mercenaries ringing the stone circle part in stunned, absolute silence. I turn my back on them, walk to the waiting bakery van parked at the edge of the camp, and climb into the passenger seat. Magnolia puts the van in drive.
"Told you," she says, wiping a smudge of dirt from my jaw.
"You start Monday."