8. Jagger #2
Or rather, the catastrophic heap of crumpled receipts, torn invoices, and bloodstained expense reports that I have been shoving into a duffel bag for the better part of three years.
She sits cross-legged on her living room floor, which she has covered with a clean sheet to protect the carpet, and she sorts through the pile with focused horror that I find enormously endearing.
Her sleeves are rolled up. Her shoes are off.
A pen is tucked behind her ear, and she has already filled two pages of a yellow legal pad with columns of numbers in handwriting so neat it looks printed.
"This receipt is covered in what I sincerely hope is barbecue sauce," she says, holding a wrinkled scrap of paper between her thumb and forefinger.
"It might be."
"It's not, is it?"
"Probably not."
She sets it on the pile labeled LEGITIMATE BUSINESS EXPENSES (BIOHAZARD) and moves on.
I sit on the floor across from her, my back against the couch, because the couch itself has learned that it cannot support my weight without making sounds of structural distress, and she works.
The Snarbo is curled in a ball by the kitchen island, all seven of its eyes half-closed in drowsy contentment.
The takeout containers from the Thai place down the street sit between us, mostly empty.
She ordered pad see ew. I ordered three entrees and ate them in the time it took her to eat half of hers.
She mentally calculates the monthly grocery budget required to sustain an Orc.
"You claimed a crossbow as a business expense," she says, studying a receipt.
"It is a business expense."
"You claimed ammunition for the crossbow as a separate line item."
"The bolts are custom-made. Expensive."
"You claimed a replacement crossbow two weeks later."
"The first one broke."
"How does a crossbow break in two weeks?"
"I hit someone with it."
She peers at me over her legal pad, and her mouth does the thing again, the almost-laugh that she suppresses with visible effort, and I assume that I would happily break a hundred crossbows if it meant she'd look at me like that each time.
The evening light comes through the new window, the one I repaired yesterday, and it falls across the sheet-covered floor in long golden rectangles that make the whole room look soft and warm and lived-in.
The smell of peanut sauce and her shampoo hits me, something clean and faintly floral that I first noticed when I pulled her against me for the inspector's benefit and have been unable to stop noticing since.
"Your deductions are a disaster. You're overpaying by at least thirty percent. Maybe more. You haven't claimed half the deductions you're entitled to, and your mileage tracking is nonexistent."
"I track mileage."
"You wrote 'drove a lot' on a napkin and stuffed it in the bag."
"That's tracking."
"Let me fix this. All of it. I'll set up a proper system. Categorized folders, quarterly reconciliation, digital backups. You'll never overpay again."
Not the land. Not the quiet. This. A warm room.
Takeout containers. Someone who cares enough to sort through the wreckage of my professional life and impose order on it with colored tabs and quarterly reconciliation schedules.
Someone who almost laughs at my jokes and calls my tax strategy a disaster with the same tenderness other people reserve for love poems.
"Yeah. Alright. Fix it."
She nods once, businesslike, and picks up her legal pad again, and we sit together on the floor of her living room while the light fades from gold to amber to the deep blue of early evening, and I do not move, and I do not speak, because the silence between us has changed.
It isn't loaded anymore. It is comfortable.
It is the silence of two people sharing a small, ordinary space, and I would burn down every bounty office in the city before I'd give this up.
The Snarbo snores softly by the kitchen island. Sabine's pen scratches against the legal pad. I raise my paperback and find my page, and for twenty minutes, nothing happens at all, and it is the best twenty minutes of my life.
Then someone knocks on the door.
Not the sharp, officious knock of a DMI inspector.
Not the frantic crash of a bounty target.
This knock is slow. Three measured beats, evenly spaced, with the kind of deliberate patience that suggests the person on the other side is in no hurry because they already know you're going to answer.
I know this knock. I've heard it four times in my career, and each time it preceded something that left scars.
Sabine looks up from her legal pad. "Are you expecting someone?"
"Stay here." I'm on my feet before the second word leaves my mouth, and the speed of the movement makes her flinch, and makes the Snarbo snap awake with all seven eyes wide and rolling.
I cross the room in three strides and pull the door open, and the hallway outside is empty except for a single figure standing perfectly still beneath the flickering fluorescent light.
The courier is tall and thin, wrapped in a coat that seems to absorb the light around it rather than reflect it.
Its face is obscured beneath a deep hood, and its hands, grey and long-fingered and wrong in a way that makes my arms flare hot, extend a single envelope toward me.
Black paper. Black wax seal. The seal is stamped with a mark I recognize instantly, a coiled serpent eating its own eye, and my stomach drops through the floor.
I take the envelope. The courier's fingers release it without a sound, and then the figure turns and walks down the hallway, and its footsteps make no noise on the carpet, and by the time it reaches the stairwell door it has already begun to fade at the edges like smoke dissolving into cold air.
I close the door. I stand with my back to Sabine and hold the black envelope in both hands, and the paper is cold against my palms, not from the cold, but from the magic soaked into its fibers. I know what this is. Every bounty hunter in the territory knows what a black-marked envelope means.
"Jagger?" Sabine' is careful. Controlled. "What is that?"
I break the seal. I unfold the single sheet of black paper inside, and the words are written in ink that glows a dull, arterial red, and they are very simple, and they are addressed to me by name, and they are a death warrant.