13. Sabine
SABINE
The bar smells like iron filings and wet leather and something underneath both of those things that is either ancient whiskey or recent blood.
Possibly both. The lighting looks like a bruise, all yellowed and dim, and every surface my eyes land on has been scratched or dented or carved into by something with claws.
The floor is sticky under my soaked, neutral-toned flats.
Rainwater drips from the hem of my blazer.
I have been composing this speech for the entire cab ride from my apartment to the Thornwall District, refining it during the seven-block walk through a torrential downpour from where the cab driver refused to drive any further, and polishing it to a razor edge during the forty-five seconds it took me to locate Jagger Ironjaw hunched over this bar like a gargoyle someone forgot to mount on a building.
"You left a note. You left a note. On my kitchen island. Weighted down with a coffee mug. Like you were canceling a dentist appointment."
Jagger opens his mouth.
"No." I hold up one finger. One single finger, and his jaw closes.The apex predator, silenced by an index finger. Good. "You don't get to talk yet. You get to talk when I am finished, and I am not finished, because I have a list."
I pull the list from my bag. It is handwritten on my firm's letterhead because I couldn't find printer paper at three in the morning and I was not about to let a formatting issue delay this confrontation.
"Item one." I smooth the paper against the bar.
A drop of something unidentifiable soaks into the corner.
I press on. "DMI Form 8B, Section 14, Subsection C, clearly states that both bonded parties must maintain continuous cohabitation at the registered address for the full ninety-day assessment period.
Continuous. Not three days. Not three days and a sticky note.
Ninety. Instead, you triggered a Penalized Severance to take the magical backlash and a decade in supernatural prison yourself—which is exactly the kind of self-sacrificing idiocy I do not accept from my roommates. "
Someone at a back table coughs. It might be a laugh. I don't turn around.
"Item two." My finger drags down the page.
"Your unilateral departure constitutes a breach of the verbal agreement we established on Day One, specifically Ground Rule Number Three on the green index card, which states, and I quote, 'Neither party will make major decisions affecting the shared living arrangement without a minimum twenty-four-hour discussion period.
' You gave me zero hours. You gave me a mug. "
Jagger's massive hands are flat on the bar, trembling with fine, violent tremors that have nothing to do with adrenaline and everything to do with the magical backlash he absorbed to spare me.
The knuckles have gone pale green, which I have learned over the past three days means he is experiencing a strong emotion he doesn't know what to do with.
His jaw is working, clamped tight against the visible pain. The tusks catch the bruised light.
"Item three, and this is the one that really burns me, Jagger." I step closer. My flats stick and release from the floor with a sound like peeling tape. "You are a coward."
The bar goes from quiet to vacuum-sealed. The air itself seems to flinch. Behind me, someone's chair scrapes back half an inch.
"You hunt people for a living. You once punched through a reinforced door because the deadbolt was, and I quote, 'annoying.
' You have a scar on your left shoulder from a cursed blade that should have killed you and you told me about it like you were describing a paper cut.
" But a five-foot-five accountant starts to matter to you, and you run. "
His eyes. God, his eyes. Amber and enormous and looking at me like I am the scariest thing in this entire bar full of killers.
"You don't get to do that." I am pointing at him now.
My fingertip is approximately one inch from his sternum, which is roughly the width and density of a car door.
"You don't get to make me feel safe and then remove the safety.
You don't get to fix my window and organize your tax receipts at my kitchen table and let me fall asleep on your shoulder during that terrible movie and then vanish because you decided, alone, in your big stupid noble head, that I am better off without you. "
The paper is crumpling in my other fist. I don't smooth it out.
"You want to protect me? Fine. Protect me.
But you protect me by being there. Not by being here.
" I gesture at the bar, the gloom, the sticky floor, the collection of bounty hunters who are all pretending very hard to be invisible.
"Not by sleeping on concrete and taking suicide contracts and convincing yourself that misery is the same thing as sacrifice. "
My breath catches.
His hand moves. One massive green finger, calloused and scarred, gently presses my pointing hand flat against him. Under my palm, his heart is hammering so hard the vibration runs up my wrist.
"Are you finished?"
I look at my list. Items four through nine blur together in my shaking grip.
"No. But the rest can wait until we're home."
The silence stretches. It stretches past uncomfortable, past awkward, all the way into geological. I could carbon-date this silence. I could file it with the DMI as a natural phenomenon.
Jagger's mouth opens. Closes. Opens again. His tusk catches on his lower lip, the silver piercing glinting. Nothing comes out. Six foot six of slate-grey lethality, and he is doing a flawless impression of a fish someone just yanked out of very deep water.
His hand is still pressing mine flat against him. The heartbeat under my palm has not slowed down. If anything, it's accelerating, which, from a cardiovascular standpoint, is mildly concerning for someone his size.
"Jagger."
He blinks.
"You can breathe. Breathing is permitted."
A massive exhale rushes out of him. The gust ruffles the crumpled list in my other hand.
Behind me, the bar remains sealed in that airtight quiet.
I am suddenly, acutely aware that I just delivered a nine-item performance review of an Orc bounty hunter's emotional failings in front of what appears to be his entire professional peer group.
My rational brain, the one that has kept me alive and employed and filing taxes on time for thirty-one years, chooses this moment to inform me that I am standing in a dangerous bar in the Thornwall District wearing business casual and holding stationery.
I do not turn around. Turning around would be a weakness. I learned that from Jagger himself, actually, on Day Twelve, when the Snarbo got into the bathroom cabinet and he told me to maintain eye contact until dominance was established.
So I maintain eye contact.
A voice from the back of the bar breaks first. Deep, guttural, belonging to someone who sounds like they gargle with motor oil.
"Ironjaw. Your woman scares me."
"Shut up, Dreck."
"I'm being honest." A chair groans as significant weight shifts in it. "I've seen you rip a troll's arm off. That was less frightening than whatever just happened here."
A murmur ripples through the room. Low grunts.
The scrape of tankards being very carefully, very quietly set down on tables.
I catch movement in my peripheral vision.
A hulking figure with a scarred jaw is slowly, deliberately tucking a wanted poster into his coat, as though putting away his homework because the teacher walked in.
Another voice, this one female and sharp as a hatchet. "She had a list. A numbered list."
"With subsections," a third voice adds, and the word comes out hushed. Reverent.
"I have a copy in my bag," I say, still not turning around. "If anyone needs to reference it."
Dead silence.
Then the motor-oil voice again, distinctly smaller. "No ma'am."
Something is happening to Jagger's face.
The runic tattoos along his neck and jaw are doing that faint glow they do when he's experiencing big emotions, pulsing in a rhythm that matches the heartbeat under my hand.
But his expression. I have cataloged every expression this Orc has made over three days of cohabitation.
The scowl when the Snarbo chewed his boot.
The soft crinkle when he reads his enormous fantasy novels.
The blank mask he wears for violence. The raw, unguarded look he gave me three nights ago when I traced his collarbone runes and his breath stopped like something inside him cracked open.
This expression is new. This one is all of them at once and none of them.
His amber eyes are too bright and his jaw is set but the muscle in it keeps jumping, and his nostrils are flared, and if I didn't know better I would say that Jagger Ironjaw, the most feared bounty hunter in the Thornwall District, is about thirty seconds from crying in front of his colleagues.
He is also still not speaking.
"Right." I peel my hand from him. The absence of that hammering pulse against my palm is immediately, physically wrong.
I fold the crumpled list and tuck it back into my bag with the composure of someone wrapping up a quarterly review.
"Here's what's going to happen. You are going to settle your tab.
You are going to collect whatever gear you brought.
And you are going to come home, where there is actual food and a functioning shower and sheets that are not made of concrete. "
"This is not a negotiation, Jagger. This is an audit finding. You are in noncompliance."
From somewhere behind me, a low whistle. Then the hatchet-voiced woman mutters, "Marry that one twice."
"Already legally, magically, and eternally bound." The words leave my mouth before my brain clears them. My cheeks catch fire. "That's. The paperwork. That's a bureaucratic fact, not a. I'm not. We're in a cohabitation agreement, it's purely administrative."