15. Sabine
SABINE
His thumbs trace the lines of my jaw like he is memorizing the geometry. Mapping coordinates. The gold light from his runes paints my skin warm and strange, and his hands are shaking.
Jagger Ironjaw's hands are shaking.
"Tell me to stop, at any point. Any second. I stop."
"I don't want you to stop."
He lowers his head, slow, giving me every opportunity to pull back, and presses his mouth to my forehead. Just my forehead. His lips are rough and warm and they stay there for three full seconds while his thumbs keep sweeping those arcs along my jaw.
Then my temple. The bridge of my nose. The corner of my mouth, just barely, a graze that sends electric current down my spine.
"You're stalling," I whisper against his lips.
"I am savoring."
His mouth finds mine. Not like the fake kiss for the inspector, sharp and performative and electric.
This is slow. Devastatingly slow. He kisses me like I am a clause in a contract he needs to read three times to fully understand, and his hands slide down my neck and span my shoulders and the size of his palms against my frame makes the air leave my lungs in a rush.
I grip his shirt. Pull. He follows where I lead, stepping into the hallway, ducking the doorframe by habit. My back finds the bedroom door and his arm shoots over my head, palm flat against the wood, holding his weight so none of it touches me until I want it to.
"Open the door."
I twist the handle. We stumble through. The bed is made with military precision because I made it this morning and I remade it after he left because the routine was the only thing keeping me from calling him, and now his weight is pressing me down into those perfectly tucked sheets and I could not care less about the creases.
He pulls back to look at me. His silver tusk-piercings catch the lamplight. The gold runes pulse up his arms, across his collarbones, disappearing under his shirt. I reach for the hem.
"Off."
He sits back on his knees and pulls it over his head in one motion.
The tattoos cover him. Every line of muscle, every ridge of scar tissue, traced and overlaid with gleaming script in a language I cannot read.
They pulse brighter where I touch. My fingers find a long, raised scar across his ribs and the runes around it flare like a warning.
"What does this one say?"
"Endurance."
I trace it end to end. His stomach contracts under my fingertips, muscles jumping.
"And this one?" My hand moves to his shoulder. A circular pattern, dense with layered symbols.
"Protection of what is claimed."
"Romantic."
"Orcish is a practical language." He catches my wrist and presses his mouth to the inside of it, right over the pulse point, and his breath raises every hair on my arm. His tusks graze the thin skin. Gentle. So impossibly, absurdly gentle for a mouth that could snap bone.
He unbuttons my blouse one button at a time. His fingers are too large for the task, built for axe handles and throat-grips, and he handles each tiny button with the same precise patience he used on the window frame. When the fabric falls open he goes still.
"What?"
"You are—" He stops. Swallows. The gold light flares to his fingertips. "I have nothing in Orcish or Common that is sufficient."
"Try math. I respond well to math."
His laugh is a low rumble that vibrates against my sternum as he drops his head and presses his mouth to my collarbone. "You are the exact correct answer to a problem I did not know I was solving."
Close enough.
His mouth moves lower. Each kiss lands deliberate and unhurried, charting a path across skin that has never been touched with this kind of focused attention.
My fingers dig into the sheets. His hand spans my entire ribcage, thumb brushing the underside of my breast, and he pauses there.
He looks up at me from under heavy brows. Asking.
"Yes."
He exhales and his mouth follows his hand and the gold light is everywhere, saturating the dim bedroom, turning the beige walls into something luminous and alive. My back arches off the bed and his free arm hooks under me, pulling me closer.
"Stay with me," he murmurs against my skin.
"I'm here."
"Stay with me."
Not a demand. A plea from a man who has spent his entire life in rooms he expected to leave. I pull his face up to mine and kiss him with everything I have, graceless and fierce, and his groan reverberates through my teeth.
His hands find the waistband of my slacks. He pauses again.
"Sabine."
"If you ask permission one more time I am going to start a spreadsheet tracking the delays."
The sound he makes is half laugh, half growl. He strips the fabric down with one smooth pull and his mouth follows, pressing hot and open against my hip, my thigh, the inside of my knee. Worshipping every inch like it is scripture in a religion he just discovered.
We don't leave the apartment for two days.
Saturday morning. Jagger is wedged into my kitchen, cracking eggs into a bowl with one hand while the other holds open a fantasy novel propped against the toaster. The book's spine is cracked in forty places. The cover features a bare-chested elf riding what appears to be a giant salamander.
"You're burning the butter."
"I am not." He doesn't look up from the page. The butter is absolutely burning.
I reach around him to move the pan off the burner. My arm spans roughly one-third of his torso. He shifts to give me access and his free hand drops to the small of my back, resting there like it has always belonged in that exact spot, and continues reading.
The eggs turn out fine. Better than fine. He seasons them with something from a small leather pouch in his gear bag, a dark red powder that smells like smoked paprika crossed with campfire.
"Orcish red salt," he says when I raise an eyebrow. "From the Thornback Mountains. My aunt sent a case last winter."
"Your aunt sends you care packages?"
"Every solstice." He slides a plate in front of me.
"She also sends socks. Very thick. She worries about my circulation in the city."
I eat the eggs. They are spectacular. The unsigned annulment papers sit on the counter six inches from my elbow. Neither of us looks at them.
Saturday afternoon. Rain hammers the windows he repaired.
The Snarbo is curled in a tight, multi-eyed ball on the armchair, snoring in a pitch that rattles the glass figurines on my bookshelf.
Jagger relaxes on the floor because the couch is too small for him, his back against the sofa, legs stretched across the living room like fallen timber.
I sit behind him on the couch with my laptop, finishing a forensic audit for a client who imports enchanted kitchenware.
His head tilts back against my knee. I type with one hand and run the other through his hair without thinking about it. Coarse. Thick. Warm.
"Orcs don't purr."
"I am not purring. That is a war hum. It indicates contentment after a successful territorial claim."
"So a purr."
"A war hum."
I scratch lightly behind his ear. The war hum intensifies.
Saturday evening. He discovers my collection of true crime documentaries and is appalled.
"These people are terrible trackers." He gestures at the screen with a slice of pizza. "He left boot prints in wet soil. Boot prints. A first-year kit could follow that trail."
"That's the point. The investigators eventually figure it out."
"Eventually." He says the word like it physically wounds him. "Four episodes to process a single footprint. I could close this case during a bathroom break."
"Not everyone has your skill set."
"Clearly." He takes an aggressive bite of pizza. On screen, a detective examines a fiber sample. Jagger leans forward with sudden intensity. "Wait. Enhance that. The weave pattern. That is Dwarven cotton."
"You can tell thread types from a TV screen?"
"Sabine. The Dwarven stitch count is unmistakable. Twenty-four per inch, always. Their guild enforces it."
He is riveted for the remaining three episodes. He correctly identifies the killer by the second commercial break.
Sunday morning. I wake up pinned under one massive grey arm. The runes pulse faintly in his sleep, cycling through soft amber and pale gold. The scar on his ribs glows warmest.
Endurance.
I trace it with my fingertip. His arm tightens. Still asleep. His face in rest is something I was not prepared for. The hard lines smooth out. The permanent tension between his brows disappears. He looks young. Almost soft.
The Snarbo creeps onto the foot of the bed and settles on his ankles. Three of its seven eyes blink at me in sequence. Approval, maybe. Or gas. Hard to tell with Snarbos.
Sunday afternoon. He fixes the loose hinge on my bathroom cabinet that has been driving me insane for eight months.
Then he fixes the kitchen faucet drip. Then the squeaky floorboard in the hallway.
He moves through my apartment with quiet purpose, tightening and adjusting, and every repair feels like a sentence in an argument he is making without words.
I reorganize his bounty receipts into quarterly folders with colorful tabs.
"You just alphabetized my kill warrants."
"Your filing system was criminal. Literally. Three of these were past their submission deadline. You would have lost the payout."
"I would have lost eleven thousand gold marks."
"Eleven thousand, four hundred, and sixty-two. I calculated the late penalties."
He looks at me. The runes flare bright enough to cast shadows. Then he crosses the kitchen in two strides, lifts me clean off the chair, and carries me back to the bedroom.
Sunday evening. We eat leftover pizza on the bed. The sheets are destroyed. My hair is beyond recovery. His novel is bookmarked on the nightstand next to my reading glasses.
The annulment papers are still on the counter. Still unsigned.
The pen is on the floor where I dropped it.
Monday morning. Six forty-five. The alarm on my phone goes off and I reach for it through a wall of grey muscle.