6. Jagger #2
I am already moving. Back down the hall, into the living room, grabbing items with indiscriminate speed.
My leather jacket goes over my arm. A pair of heavy boots.
My knife belt, which I shove under the bed the moment I'm back in the room.
I yank open the top drawer of her dresser—Sabine makes a strangled sound of outrage—and stuff my worn black undershirt in among her neatly folded blouses, then toss my leather bracers onto the nightstand, knocking the financial planning book aside.
My shaving kit gets thrown onto the bathroom counter through the en suite door that connects to the bedroom, and I grasp the thick fantasy novel I've been reading on the couch—"The Siege of Thornwall," book four of a twelve-part series—and drop it on the right nightstand with enough force to shake the lamp.
"The bed," Sabine whispers frantically. "The bed is too neat. It looks like a display."
She's right. No two people who actually share a bed leave it looking like a furniture catalog.
I lift the duvet and pull it back on the right side, creating an artful rumple, then dent the right pillow with my fist. Sabine, to her credit, does the same on the left side, messing up her own perfect arrangement with visible pain on her face, like she is desecrating something sacred.
"Laundry," I mutter, and strip off my belt, draping it over the chair in the corner.
I spot one of my dark socks from the living room floor—I'd kicked it off last night on the couch—and toss it near the bed.
Sabine opens her closet door, and we both stare at the interior, which is organized by color, season, and fabric weight with a level of precision that borders on religious devotion.
"There's no room for your clothes in here." She sounds genuinely distraught, and despite the urgency of the situation, a small, warm sensation blooms behind my sternum at the sight of her face.
"Push things to the left. Leave a gap on the right. Just enough to look like I've claimed territory."
She shoves an armful of hangers sideways with the resigned expression of someone watching her world order collapse, and I hang my second leather jacket in the gap.
It looks absurd—one massive, scarred, dark piece of armor hanging among a sea of tailored beige and soft gray—but it looks shared, which is all that matters.
The toilet flushes in the hallway bathroom. Footsteps on tile.
Sabine and I look at each other across the rumpled bed, both slightly out of breath, and something passes between us that I don't have time to examine. A shared conspiracy. A silent acknowledgment that we are in this together, however reluctantly, and that the only way through is forward.
I move back to her side and settle my arm around her shoulders just as Inspector Delacroix appears in the bedroom doorway.
The Fae woman's gaze sweeps the room with surgical precision.
I watch her eyes track from the rumpled bed to the dual nightstands—her financial guide displaced by my leather bracers, my thick novel sitting boldly on the right side—to the open closet where my jacket hangs among her clothes like a dark intruder in a pastel kingdom.
She notes the shaving kit visible through the en suite bathroom door, the heavy boots tucked beside the dresser, the knife belt that I understand with a spike of alarm is slightly visible beneath the bed skirt.
"Cozy," she says. The word carries no inflection whatsoever.
"We've been making it work. It's a one-bedroom, so space is tight, but we manage."
"Manage." There is that word again, and the inspector writes something in her portfolio with a long, deliberate stroke of her pen.
She looks up, and those winter-pale eyes settle on us with an intensity that makes my arm runes prickle with defensive energy.
"You use that word frequently, Ms. Lin. Managing.
It suggests tolerance rather than genuine bonding. "
"We're still in the early stages," I say, pulling Sabine closer against my side, feeling the warmth of her through my bare skin. "The bond is new. We're learning each other."
"Are you?" Inspector Delacroix closes her portfolio with a soft snap and tucks the pen into her breast pocket with deliberate slowness.
She takes one step into the bedroom, then another, her heels clicking on the hardwood floor that borders Sabine's area rug.
She is close enough now that I can feel the faint shimmer of Fae magic radiating from her, a cold, probing energy that presses against my skin like fingers searching for a pulse.
"Mr. Ironjaw, I've conducted over three hundred cohabitation inspections in the last fiscal year.
I know what a genuine bonded household feels like.
The emotional resonance, the territorial markers, the unconscious gravitational pull between mates.
" She pauses, letting the words settle. "And I know what a performance looks like. "
The room goes very still. Meatball, who has followed us down the hall with dogged loyalty has bonded to a food source, presses his body against my ankle and makes a low, worried gurgling noise.
"I'm going to need a demonstration," Inspector Delacroix says, and her gaze locks onto the narrow space between Sabine and me like she can see the tension humming there, electric and unresolved. "A kiss. Between mates. Right now, if you don't mind."
Sabine's fingers clamp down on my ribs so hard I'm fairly certain she's left permanent indentations.