14. Jagger
JAGGER
The DMI seal glows faint gold under Sabine's kitchen light. I know that seal. I have seen it stamped on arrest warrants, bounty contracts, deportation orders.
She sets the papers on the kitchen table, right on top of the spreadsheets we built together two weeks ago.
The ones that traced Varkos's money through six shell companies and a haunted laundromat.
She squares the edges of the annulment form with the table's corner.
Precise. Measured. The way she does everything.
"Well." She reaches for her pen cup. Selects the black one.
Always the black one for official documents.
Blue for personal notes. Green for corrections.
I should not know this. "This is actually excellent timing.
I was going to call the DMI on Monday to ask about the violation report you submitted, but they've saved me the trouble. "
The pen hovers over the signature line. Her fingers are white at the knuckles.
"Self-reporting a supernatural felony to expedite a bureaucratic process is certainly a novel approach. Drastic, but pleasant."
The Snarbo presses against my shin, all eyes tracking between the two of us like a spectator at a tennis match. Even the creature can read a room better than this paperwork suggests.
Sabine uncaps the pen. The small click sounds like a gunshot in the apartment.
"It says we both need to initial on page three and sign the final page. There's a notarization requirement, but the blood-magic ink self-notarizes upon contact with skin oils, so that's actually quite efficient. I have to give the DMI credit for streamlining at least one process in their entire—"
Her hands are shaking. The pen trembles between her fingers like a dowsing rod over water. A small dot of black ink drops onto the signature line, blooming into the enchanted paper.
I pull out a chair. Sit. The chair protests but holds. My knees press against the underside of her kitchen table, which is built for someone a foot shorter and two hundred pounds lighter. The spreadsheets flutter.
She does not sit. She stands across from me with the pen and the papers and the tremor she cannot control, and her jaw is set at that angle I first saw in the DMI waiting room. The angle that means she has calculated every variable and reached a conclusion and will not be argued out of it.
But her hands.
"The sooner we process this, the sooner we can both resume our normal routines." She taps the pen against the table twice. Three times. "You can go back to your office. Take that new bounty. I'll repair the window deposit situation with my landlord. It's really the most logical—"
"Sabine."
"—course of action, and I've already drafted a post-separation task list, which I can share with you via email if you'd prefer not to coordinate in person—"
"Sabine."
The pen stops tapping.
I lean forward. The chair groans a second warning.
Her kitchen smells like lavender dish soap and the oatmeal she burned this morning and forgot to scrape out of the pot.
A small, calcified ring of oatmeal sits in the sink behind her.
She has not cleaned it. Sabine cleans everything.
Sabine once reorganized my ammunition box by caliber and color.
"Give me the pen."
She holds it out. Our fingers brush. Hers are ice cold.
I take the pen. Flip to page three. The signature line waits, bordered by tiny runes that pulse in slow, patient gold. My initials will dissolve the bond. Hers will seal the dissolution. Clean. Legal. Final.
I set the pen down on the table.
"No."
Her eyes snap to mine.
"What do you mean, no?"
"It is a short word. Two letters. I am confident you have encountered it before."
"Jagger." Color floods her cheeks. "This is a legally binding government document. You can't just say no to a legally binding government—"
"I just did."
"That's not how bureaucracy works!"
"And yet."
She presses both palms flat on the table, leaning toward me. The tremor runs through her wrists and into the wood. The spreadsheets crinkle.
"You left," she hisses. "You left me a note on a coffee-mug paperweight and disappeared into that horrible office with the leaking ceiling and the floor that smells like wet dog and old blood, and now you're sitting in my kitchen refusing to sign annulment papers?
You do not get to do this. You do not get to—"
Her words crack.
One crack. Hairline fracture. Right down the center of the word "this."
The Snarbo whimpers and covers three of its eyes with a tentacle.
I push the papers to the far edge of the table, out of her reach.
"I am not signing those."
"Pick them back up." She points at the papers like they personally offended her. "Pick them up and sign them like a rational adult."
"No."
"Jagger Ironjaw, I swear on every tax code in the federal register—"
"I am not signing them because I do not want to."
That stops her. Not the words. The way I break on want. I have taken crossbow bolts to the shoulder with more composure than this. Sabine stands frozen with her index finger still aimed at the annulment papers, her mouth slightly open, her brown eyes too wide behind her glasses.
The Snarbo slinks under the couch.
Smart creature.
"You don't want to," she repeats. Flat. Testing the sentence for structural integrity.
"No."
"That's... that doesn't..." She pulls out the chair across from me. Sits. Folds her hands on the table in front of her, fingers interlaced. I have seen her do this exact posture in her office when a client's numbers do not reconcile. "Please explain your reasoning."
My reasoning. She wants my reasoning. As if what is happening inside my rib cage can be organized into columns and balanced at the bottom of a ledger.
I look at her hands. Still folded. Still trembling. She tucks her thumbs tighter to hide it.
"Three weeks ago I was sleeping on a concrete floor.
I had a bounty contract pinned to the wall with a hunting knife.
The ceiling dripped something brown into a bucket I had to empty every four hours.
I owned two shirts, both of which had blood on them.
I ate cold meat out of a tin and I read my books by the light coming through a crack in the wall because the electrical wiring is a fire hazard I cannot afford to repair. "
Sabine blinks. Her thumbs go still.
"That was my life. That has been my life for eleven years.
Before that, worse. Before that, cage fights in the Undercity for rent money, and before that, running packages for people who would have slit my throat for a late delivery.
" I set my palms flat against the table, matching her earlier posture.
The wood creaks. "I am very good at violence.
I am exceptional at it. My name on a warrant makes people surrender before I arrive.
I have built an entire reputation on being the thing that walks in when hope walks out. "
A siren wails somewhere outside. Three blocks away. Heading south. My ears track it automatically, a reflex I cannot shut off. Probably never will.
"And I am so tired."
The kitchen light hums. The oatmeal pot sits in the sink. Her lavender soap dispenser catches a thin bar of afternoon sun through the window I repaired with my own hands.
"I am tired of concrete floors and brown drips and cold tin meals.
I am tired of sleeping with a blade under my pillow and checking exit routes before I sit down in a restaurant.
I am tired of every person I meet calculating whether I am about to hurt them.
" I swallow. The silver piercing in my tusk clicks against my lower teeth.
"I came here because I had no choice. I stayed because you handed me a list of rules and you organized my ammunition and you burned oatmeal at six in the morning and sang off-key while you did it, and for the first time in eleven years I slept through the entire night without waking up to check the door. "
Her eyes are glassy. She unfolds her hands, then quickly folds them again.
"That first morning. The raw meat." A rough sound escapes my throat.
Almost a laugh. "You looked at my Orcish breakfast spread like I had committed a felony against your kitchen, and then you got a second bowl and made me oatmeal.
Nobody has made me food since the last time I saw my mother, years ago. "
Sabine's lower lip disappears between her teeth.
"Ninety days. That was the sentence. I have spent every single one of those days pretending I was counting down, and I was counting, Sabine, but not toward the end.
I was counting what I had. Mornings where you handed me coffee in that ridiculous mug with the cartoon cat.
Evenings where you read your audit reports on one end of the couch and I read my book on the other and neither of us said a word for two hours and it was the best silence I have ever sat in. "
I push the annulment papers another inch away.
"I left because I am dangerous. That part is true.
People will come for me again. My world is ugly and it follows me and it crashed through your window and nearly touched you, and that thought alone makes my vision go dark around the edges.
" My hands curl against the table. My forearm runes pulse a slow, warning amber.
"But I came back because you dragged me out of a bar by my ear, and you were not afraid of me.
You were angry at me. And that is not the same thing. "
She opens her mouth.
I hold up one hand.
"I am not asking you to keep me. I am asking you not to sign those papers today. Give me the ninety days we were promised. All of them. Let me earn the right to sit at this table."
The kitchen light flickers once. The Snarbo peeks one eye out from under the couch.
Sabine stares at the annulment papers at the table's edge, then back at me, and her chin lifts to that angle again. The calculated one. The immovable one.
"You owe me a new window deposit."