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Her shoulders stiffen, slightly, but I notice the change. “Depends.”

“Four am?” My pulse kicks up.

Her thumb stops tracing the rim of her coffee cup. “Don’t.”

I blink. “Don’t what?”

“The thing.”

“What?”

Her voice flattens. “The tiny-woman-works-late-therefore—she-needs-a-man-to-protect-her thing.”

Hardly, considering she turned a much larger man into bloody ribbons about thirteen hours ago.

“I was going to say it sounds exhausting.” I lift my cup instead. “And unsafe.”

“I’ve been taking care of myself since I was eighteen,” she scoffs.

“That sentence did absolutely nothing to reassure me.”

“It wasn’t designed to.”

I know people who learned self-reliance because they wanted independence. Jubilee sounds like someone who learned it because nobody was coming. I don’t like that.

So naturally, I poke at it. “Bartending pay well?”

She reaches for the creamer cartons. “Pretty good at a nightclub.”

Casual warmth fills me at how she stacks them as a child would. Not bored. Just…busy work. I consider the girl who ran three miles through a thunderstorm because home was apparently worse.

“You made it sound like bartending wasn’t the only thing you do,” I remark.

A beat passes. Her shoulders ease. “It’s not.”

I wait. She tears the paper sleeve off her straw, rolling the torn strip. “Freelance computer stuff.”

“Web design?”

The expression she gives me is so deeply offended, I nearly laugh. “Jesus, no.”

“IT?” I ask.

“Sometimes.” She stacks a few more creamer cartons. They balance precariously.

“Programming?”

“Sometimes.”

“Cybersecurity?”

She pauses, inclining her head, squinting. Interesting.

I pick up my coffee. It’s cooled enough now; the nuttiness comes through more strongly than the roast. Maybe a three point eight. “What kind of cybersecurity?”

Her tongue pokes out slightly. Fucking love that. “The kind where people pay me, and I do things on a computer.”

“Very illuminating.”