Page 4 of Tusks And Conditions

"I don't care about the cohabitation requirement." She's standing straighter now, her small frame somehow projecting an authority that makes me want to simultaneously laugh and kneel at her feet. "There has to be another option. I have an apartment. A nice apartment. In a safe neighborhood. With a doorman. And locks. And absolutely no supernatural gang activity."

"The bond requires proximity," Pemberton repeats, though he's looking at her with something like respect now. "Where you achieve that proximity is technically up to you, as long as both parties agree."

They both turn to look at me.

I should say no. I should insist on my own territory, my own space, the familiar walls of my apartment where I know every shadow and every creaking floorboard. The Hollows are dangerous, yes, but they're my kind of dangerous. I know how to navigate the clan politics, how to avoid the territorial disputes, and how to keep my head down when the vampires start getting territorial about their feeding grounds. Sabine's "safe neighborhood" is unknown territory, full of humans who will look at me with fear and suspicion, full of rules and expectations I don't understand.

She's not a damsel in distress. She's a woman who has been thrown into an impossible situation and is already fighting to take back control. She's small and fragile and absolutely human, but there's steel in her spine that I recognize, the kind of steel that's been forged through surviving things that should have broken her.

And beneath all of that calculation, there's the bond, thrumming between us like a living thing, telling me in no uncertain terms that if I let this woman out of my sight, something essential in me will simply stop functioning.

"Fine, I'll move into your apartment."

Sabine blinks at me, clearly not expecting capitulation. "You'll what?"

"I'll move in. With you." I shrug, trying to project a casualness I don't feel. "Ninety days. Then we file for annulment and go our separate ways."

"You can't just—you can't just invite yourself to live in my home."

"You invited me when you refused to come to mine." I allow myself a small smile, just enough to flash the tips of my tusks. "The bond requires proximity, Miss Lin. Director Pemberton said so himself. So either you come to the Hollows, or I come to you. Those are the options."

She's not happy about this. She's not going to be happy about this for a long time, possibly ever. But she's pragmatic enough to recognize when she's been outmaneuvered.

"Fine," she says, the word coming out through gritted teeth. "Fine. But there are going to be rules."

"Of course."

"Lots of rules."

"I would expect nothing less."

Pemberton claps his hands together, his shark's smile back in full force. "Excellent. I'll have the cohabitation agreement drawn up within the hour. Miss Lin, you'll need to provide your address for our records. Mr. Ironjaw, I trust you can arrange to have your belongings transported by the end of the week?"

I think about my apartment. The single mattress on the floor. The stack of paperback fantasy novels on the milk crate I use as a nightstand. The weapons cabinet that takes up most of the living room. The complete absence of anything that could be called "belongings" in any meaningful sense.

"That won't be a problem," I say.

Sabine makes a sound that might be a laugh or might be a sob. The pixie dust on her shoulder sparkles in the fluorescent light, and somewhere in the distance, the werewolf has finally stopped howling at the vending machine.

Ninety days. I can survive ninety days in a beige human apartment with a woman who looks at me like I'm a natural disaster that's just destroyed her carefully organized life. I've survived worse. I've survived the fighting pits and the bounty hunting and the endless, grinding loneliness of being a monster in a world that fears me.

The hard part is going to be walking away when the ninety days are up.

CHAPTER 3

SABINE

The elevator ride to the fourteenth floor is the longest seven minutes of my entire life.

Jagger stands beside me, taking up approximately eighty percent of the available space, his massive shoulder pressed against the elevator wall in a way that makes the metal creak ominously. The fluorescent light above us flickers every few seconds, casting strange shadows across the angular planes of his face, highlighting the silver piercings in his tusk and the luminescence of the runic tattoos that crawl up his neck and disappear beneath the collar of his leather armor. He smells like woodsmoke and something darker, something primal that my hindbrain identifies as predator even as the rest of me is trying very hard to pretend this is a normal Tuesday evening and I am simply coming home from work with a completely ordinary roommate.

My reflection stares back at me from the polished elevator doors, and I barely recognize myself. There's still pixie dust glittering on my blazer despite my attempts to brush it off in the DMI bathroom, and my hair has escaped its careful bob to hang in limp strands around my face. My muted flats are scuffed beyond repair, and there's a coffee stain on my collar that I somehow missed this morning in my rush to get to the DMI office before it closed. I look like someone who has been through a natural disaster, which is appropriate because I have been, and the natural disaster is currently breathing approximately six inches above my head.

The elevator dings. The doors slide open. I step out into the familiar hallway of my apartment building, taking in the cream-colored walls and the inoffensive abstract art that management installed last year and the soft carpet that muffles footsteps, and for one desperate moment, I consider making a break for the emergency stairwell. I could run. I could disappear. I could change my name and move to another city and start over as someone who has never heard of Form 8B or blood-magic ink or fated mate bonds that apparently supersede all known laws of human autonomy.

But then I remember Director Pemberton's words, delivered with that terrible cheerfulness that seemed to be his default setting: Breaking the bond illegally will result in a decade of supernatural prison for you both. I've seen documentaries about supernatural prison. I've seen the footage of the interdimensional holding cells, the temporal loops designed to make sentences feel like centuries, the wards that strip away any sense of self until prisoners emerge as hollow shells of their former selves. I am many things, but I am not someone who is willing to risk that kind of fate just because I accidentally married an Orc.

So I walk down the hallway toward my apartment, and I listen to the heavy thud of Jagger's boots on the carpet behind me, and I try very hard not to think about the fact that this creature who has killed people for money is about to enter my home and sleep under my roof for the next ninety days.