13. Sabine #2
Nobody in the bar believes me. I don't believe me. The sticky floor doesn't believe me.
Jagger reaches behind the bar. His hand comes back holding a battered leather pack, already stuffed. He's been sitting here with a packed bag. He never unpacked. Three days of living in my apartment and the Orc still keeps a go-bag like he's always one conversation away from leaving.
Or one conversation away from coming back.
He stands. The bar stool looks like children's furniture beneath him. Every bounty hunter in the room goes very still as he rises to his full height, slings the pack over one shoulder, and looks down at me.
"You picked my lock."
"I watched a tutorial."
The corner of his mouth twitches. Not a smile. Not yet. But the ghost of one, haunting the space between his tusk and his cheek.
"You came to the Thornwall District. Alone. At night."
"I took a cab for most of it."
"Most of it."
"The driver had boundaries. I respected them. Then I walked."
The glow on his runic tattoos pulses brighter.
His pack is on his shoulder but his boots haven't moved.
He is doing the thing he does when he wants to argue but knows he's outmatched.
The jaw clench. The slow blink. The slight flare of his nostrils like he's trying to inhale a counterargument from the stale bar air.
I reach up.
His ear is surprisingly warm. Thick cartilage, slightly pointed at the tip, with a texture like worn suede. I get a firm grip on the lower curve of it and pull downward.
His head follows.
"Ow."
"Walk."
"That is my ear."
"Astute observation. Walk."
He walks. A slate-grey bounty hunter, shuffling forward because a woman a full foot shorter has his ear pinched between her thumb and forefinger and is steering him toward the door like a shopping cart with a bad wheel. His pack bumps against the doorframe. He ducks. I don't release my grip.
Behind us, the bar erupts.
Not in laughter, exactly. In something deeper. Guttural barks and table-slapping and what I think might be applause but sounds more like a series of small explosions. The motor-oil voice rises above the rest.
"Ironjaw! She's got you by the ear! Literally by the ear!"
"Dreck." Jagger reverberates through his skull and into my fingers. "I will come back and remove your spine."
"No you won't," I say, and steer him left onto the street.
He doesn't argue.
The Thornwall District at night is everything my risk assessment predicted and worse.
The streetlights flicker in a pattern that suggests either faulty wiring or sentient malice.
Something with too many legs scuttles across a fire escape three stories up.
The sidewalk has cracks wide enough to lose a shoe in, and every doorway holds a shadow that is either a person or something that used to be one.
I keep my grip on his ear and walk faster.
"Sabine."
"No."
"I can carry you. This neighborhood is not safe for—"
"You don't get to protect me right now. Right now you are in the penalty box. The penalty box does not come with speaking privileges."
His ear is warm under my fingers. The skin there is softer than anywhere else on him, which I know because three nights ago I mapped every inch of available surface and filed the data in a part of my brain that has no business existing. His pulse throbs against my thumb. Still too fast.
We make it to the main road where the streetlights actually function. A cab idles at the corner. The driver takes one look at the enormous Orc being led by the ear by a woman in beige business casual, and his eyebrows climb into his hairline.
"Get in," I tell Jagger.
The cab's rear suspension groans. The entire vehicle lists to the right as he folds himself into the backseat. I slide in beside him and give my address.
The driver pulls away from the curb. The cab stabilizes. Barely.
"Sabine. I left because—"
"Because you're an idiot."
Pause.
"Because you decided that your feelings about my safety were more important than my feelings about your presence.
Which is not protection, Jagger. It's control.
And I already fired my last therapist for being less insightful than a spreadsheet, so I am not interested in having this conversation with someone who thinks leaving a coffee-mug paperweight constitutes adequate notice. "
The cab takes a left. Jagger's massive frame sways into me, then corrects. His pack sits between his boots like a guilty dog.
"I will not apologize for wanting to keep you alive."
"I didn't ask you to apologize for that. I asked you to come home."
His jaw works. The silver piercing catches a passing streetlight and throws a brief spark across the cab's interior. He says nothing for four blocks. Five. Six.
Then, so quiet I almost miss it under the engine noise: "I missed your oatmeal."
"My oatmeal is objectively terrible."
"Yes."
We pull up to my building. I pay. We ride the elevator in silence, his bulk taking up two-thirds of the available space, his pack dripping something onto the floor that I choose not to investigate.
I unlock my door. He ducks through it. The Snarbo launches itself off the couch and hits him mid-chest with all eyes weeping in transparent joy.
"Down," he rumbles, and the creature melts to the floor, vibrating.
He sets his pack by the door and looks around the apartment. The index cards on the refrigerator. The spreadsheets still fanned across the kitchen table. The dent in the couch cushion that has not recovered from his absence.
He is home. He knows it. I know it.
Neither of us says it.
I am reaching for the kettle when the mail slot clatters. A thick envelope hits the floor, the DMI's embossed seal catching the overhead light. I pick it up and slit it open with my thumbnail.
The header reads: DEPARTMENT OF MAGICAL INTEGRATION — FORM 22A: OFFICIAL CERTIFICATE OF BOND ANNULMENT.
Approved. Effective immediately. Processed and expedited pursuant to the Penalized Severance and formal declaration of cohabitation violation submitted by Jagger Ironjaw.
Eighty-seven days early. Signatures denote Petitioner A's acceptance of bond dissolution and Petitioner B's acceptance of magical backlash and a mandatory ten-year containment sentence.
The paper is warm in my hands. Blood-magic ink shimmers along the signature line, waiting for two sets of initials.
We're free.