11. Sabine #4
He wraps one arm around my lower back and tilts my hips and the new angle is a detonation.
I come apart with a cry that I muffle against his shoulder, my whole body locking around him, and he follows me over the edge two thrusts later with a sound that shakes the bed frame and rattles the water glass on the nightstand and makes the Snarbo howl in the living room.
We stay like that. Tangled together, breathing hard, his forehead against my shoulder and my fingers in his hair and the glow of his runes fading from gold to soft amber to nothing, banking like coals in a dying fire.
The rain has stopped. The apartment is quiet except for our breathing and the distant, muffled sound of the Snarbo resettling on the couch.
He lays me down like I'm something precious and pulls the blanket over us.
He curls his body around mine from behind, one arm draped over my waist, his hand resting flat against my stomach where my heartbeat pulses under his palm.
His breath slows against the back of my neck.
His body is a furnace along my spine like a wall, a boundary between me and every cold and dangerous thing in the world outside this bed.
I fall asleep in twelve seconds. Which is a personal record. My previous best was twenty-three minutes, achieved only with the aid of a white noise machine set to "gentle rainstorm" and precisely two milligrams of melatonin.
I wake to cold.
Not the dramatic, story-book cold of an empty bed that you notice immediately, your hand reaching across the sheets in cinematic slow motion.
This is subtler. A gradual awareness that the furnace at my back has been removed, that the arm over my waist is gone, that the massive dent in the mattress beside me has sprung back to its original shape in a way that suggests the weight was lifted some time ago.
My body registers the absence before my brain does, curling instinctively toward the vacant space, searching for heat that isn't there.
I open my eyes. The bedroom is grey with early dawn.
My clothes, which were scattered across the floor last night in various states of damp urgency, have been collected and folded into a neat stack on the dresser.
His have not. His are gone. The chest plate.
The boots with the complicated lacing. The black shirt that smelled like ozone and rain.
The leather gear we scattered across the room to fool the DMI inspector is gone too.
Every trace of him, the heavy belt hung over the closet door, the shoulder holster draped across the chair, the ridiculous combat knife he kept on the nightstand because he said he "slept better with a blade within reach.
" All of it. Removed with the kind of silent, surgical precision that only a professional tracker, someone trained to enter and exit spaces without detection, could achieve while their supposed mate slept six inches away.
I sit up. The blanket pools around me. There's a folded piece of paper on the pillow beside mine.
It's not stationery. It's torn from the back of one of his thick fantasy novels, the ones he pretends he doesn't read, the ragged edge still attached. His handwriting is surprisingly neat. Dense, square letters pressed hard into the paper with what looks like a carpenter's pencil.
Sabine,
Last night confirmed what I already knew.
Being near me puts you in danger. The hit is still active.
More will come. They won't stop because I eliminated six of them.
They'll send twelve next time, or twenty, and next time you might not be standing in the doorway with pepper spray.
Next time you might be asleep in this bed.
I've contacted the DMI and invoked a Penalized Severance. I told them I violated the cohabitation terms. The prison time and the magical backlash are mine, not yours. I made sure of that. You'll be free of the bond within the week, without having to wait the ninety days.
Don't look for me. Don't trace anything. Don't use your forensic accounting skills to find my accounts or my contacts or my safe houses because I know you can and I know you will and I am asking you, for once in your stubborn, brilliant, beautiful life, to leave something alone.
The Snarbo's food is under the sink. He eats twice a day. He likes it when you scratch behind his third eye.
You deserve a safe, quiet life with someone who doesn't get death warrants delivered to your door. I'm sorry I can't be that person. I'm sorry about your window. I'm sorry about all of it.
Except last night. I will never be sorry about last night.
J.
I read it twice. Three times. The carpenter's pencil smudges slightly under my thumb where I grip the paper too hard.
The Snarbo appears in the bedroom doorway, all eyes blinking in staggered sequence, and tilts his lumpy head at me as a multi-eyed supernatural beast is recognizably, unmistakably worried.
I look at the folded note. I look at Rule Number Seven, still pinned to the refrigerator in accusatory magenta, visible through the open bedroom door. I look at the neat stack of my folded clothes, placed with the same devastating gentleness he used to remove them.