Page 32 of Tusks And Conditions

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.