16. Jagger
JAGGER
The line goes dead. I pocket the phone and stare at what used to be my office.
My structure.
Twelve years of case files. Contact networks scrawled on index cards because I don't trust digital storage.
Three sets of custom-forged restraints. My crossbow, Patience, which took an Orcish weaponsmith four months to balance for my grip.
A signed first edition of The Siege of Thornwall that I found in a dead man's apartment and kept because nobody else wanted it.
Smoke rolls across the street and stings my eyes. My forearms pulse hot, a low amber glow, rage sitting just beneath my ribs like a swallowed coal.
Korvan.
Bankrupt, humiliated, stripped of his laundering network by a five-foot-five accountant with a forensic eye and no tolerance for sloppy bookkeeping. So he does what small, vicious men do when the money dries up. He burns something.
A beam collapses inside. The roof sags inward like a punched stomach. Two of the dwarven firefighters swear in Khuzdul and pull their line back.
I catalog the damage. Not the physical loss.
I can replace equipment. Files can be rebuilt.
The real damage is strategic. Without my case records, three open bounties go cold.
Without my restraints, I cannot safely transport live captures.
Without my office, I have no registered base of operations, which means the Bounty Licensing Board will suspend my permits within seventy-two hours.
Korvan knew all of this.
This was not spite. This was surgical.
I hear her before I see her. The sharp click of heels on broken sidewalk, moving at a pace that suggests running without technically breaking into a run. Professional speed-walking. An accountant's sprint.
Sabine stops ten feet from me. Her eyes track from the burning building to my face and back.
"Oh."
One syllable. Packed tight with everything she won't waste time saying.
She closes the distance. Stands beside me. Her shoulder presses into my arm just above the elbow because that is where her shoulder reaches, and the contact is so small and so deliberate that the amber glow in my runes dims slightly.
"Is anyone hurt?"
"Gretch from the pawnshop got out early. I saw him on the corner with a box of his best inventory."
"Just the building, then."
"Just the building."
The roof caves in completely. A column of embers and black smoke punches skyward. Someone on the street screams. The fire crew keeps working.
Sabine opens her bag. Pulls out a legal pad. Clicks a pen.
"Insurance?"
"Bounty hunters don't generally qualify for standard property coverage."
"Supernatural risk rider policy?"t
"Expired. Three months ago. I forgot to renew."
The pen stops. She looks up at me. The expression on her face is the one she uses when my tax receipts are organized by "vibes" instead of date.
"You forgot."
"I was busy being accidentally bonded to a woman who color-codes her spice rack."
"The spice rack system is intuitive and you admitted that last Thursday." She returns to the legal pad. "We'll file a criminal damages claim against Korvan directly. I still have his full financial records mirrored on my work server. The original data I traced is backed up in three locations."
"He's bankrupt."
"He has hidden assets. There are always hidden assets.
" She writes something in handwriting so neat it looks printed.
"I found two shell companies during my initial trace that I flagged but didn't pursue because they weren't relevant to the original case.
One is registered in the Fae Autonomous Zone.
The other operates through a goblin credit union in the Undercity. "
She is already ahead of me. She was ahead of me before she arrived.
"Sabine."
"I'm also going to call the DMI and report this as bond-related harassment, which triggers automatic protective investigation and freezes any remaining accounts associated with the perpetrator."
"Sabine."
"What?"
"You left work."
She doesn't look up from the legal pad. "I told Roger I had a family emergency."
Family.
The rune over my heart flickers once. Gold, not amber. She doesn't notice. She's already flipped to a new page and started a numbered action list.
Across the street, my life burns to the foundation. Twelve years of solitary, violent work collapsing into ash and ruin.
Beside me, Sabine writes item number four on her list: Contact Bounty Licensing Board re: temporary operational variance.
She underlines it twice.
The fire crew pulls back another twenty feet.
The troll, a grey-skinned bruiser with two missing fingers on his left hand and the weary posture of someone who has seen too many arson calls this month, shakes his massive head at the structure.
Done. Whatever the hoses are doing now is just courtesy.
Keeping the neighboring buildings from catching. My office is past saving.
Sabine writes item number seven on her list. Something about filing deadlines. Her pen moves in precise, efficient strokes. No wasted motion.
The last standing wall buckles.
The interior staircase, the one with the third step that groaned like a wounded animal every time I climbed it, folds into the inferno. Sparks scatter. A chunk of masonry hits the sidewalk thirty feet away, and a dwarf firefighter kicks it into the gutter without breaking stride.
I wait for the grief.
I stand there on the cracked sidewalk with smoke in my lungs and ash drifting onto my shoulders, and I wait for the loss to gut me.
For that particular hollow ache that comes when the thing you built collapses.
I know that feeling. Felt it when my first partner caught a cursed bolt in the neck during a Shadowvale extraction.
Felt it when my clan refused to speak my name after I chose bounty work over military service.
I wait.
Nothing comes.
Not nothing. Something comes, but it is the wrong thing entirely. A loosening in the muscles between my shoulder blades that have been knotted tight for over a decade. The sensation of a strap being cut.
Patience is in there. My crossbow. Four months of Orcish smithwork. I have killed seventeen targets with that weapon and incapacitated over sixty. The stock was carved from ironwood and inlaid with bone. It fit my hand like it was grown there.
I do not miss it.
The case files. Hundreds of them. Names, locations, networks, debts. The entire architecture of my professional life rendered down to carbon and memory. Contacts I cultivated through years of favors and threats and careful, patient trust-building.
Gone. All of it. Fine.
Fine.
Better than fine.
Sabine taps her pen against the legal pad. "I'm going to need your bounty license number for the variance application. Is it the same number on your tax forms?"
"Probably."
"Probably." She circles something on her list. Hard. "You filed three years of returns using 'probably' as your operative framework, and it shows."
"Sabine."
"What?"
"I don't want the variance."
Her pen stops. She looks up from the legal pad. Smoke drifts between us, a thin grey veil, and through it her dark eyes are sharp and searching.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean I don't want a temporary operational variance. I don't want to file for replacement permits. I don't want to contact the Licensing Board."
"Jagger, without an active license your income drops to zero. You need operational standing to take contracts."
"I know."
The wall collapses. Not dramatically. Just a tired, slow lean to the left and then a crumbling slide into the burning pile. Bricks scatter. Dust and ash billow outward. Sabine shields her legal pad with her body instinctively, protecting the action list from debris.
"I'm done."
She blinks. Once.
"Done with what, specifically?"
"Bounty hunting. All of it." The words come out so easy.
Like they've been sitting in my throat for years, lined up and patient, waiting for the right fire to shake them loose.
"Tracking targets. Restraining marks. Sleeping in that office with one eye open because someone might kick the door in. I'm done, Sabine."
"You can't just retire on a sidewalk."
"I am literally doing that right now."
Her mouth opens. Closes. The pen hovers over the legal pad like it desperately wants to write something but cannot find the appropriate line item for an orc quitting his entire career in front of a burning building.
"There are forms," she says. "Procedures. You need to file a formal cessation notice with the Licensing Board and close out all active warrants. Any open bounties need to be transferred or surrendered. There's a mandatory sixty-day wind-down period."
"Then we'll file it."
"And your income?"
"I have savings."
"How much?"
"Enough."
"That is not a number, Jagger."
The troll firefighter signals his crew. They start packing up the main hose. The building is just embers now, a smoldering skeleton of the life I built when I had nothing else worth building for. Smoke pours off the rubble in thick lazy columns.
I look down at Sabine. Ash in her hair. Pen still raised. Ready to organize my entire future into neat, numbered bullet points if I give her half a chance.
"Enough," I say again, and reach down and take the pen from her hand. I turn the legal pad toward me. Cross out everything she wrote.
She makes a sound like I just set her spreadsheet on fire.
I write one line on the blank page in handwriting so rough it looks like a seismograph reading.
Things that matter.
Underneath, I write her name.
She stares at it. Her jaw works. She snatches the legal pad back, pulls a second pen from her bag, and writes directly beneath my scrawl in her clean, precise print:
Sustainable financial plan required before romantic gestures are accepted.
She underlines it three times.