He replied back almost immediately.
Garrick: Oh, thank Vorrak. I was really worried there for a minute. Why wait in Elmaris? You missed the bonus. Just deliver her now.
Me: It’s complicated. Safer to leave in the morning.
Garrick: Well, I trust your judgment. I guess I’ll see you in Noctis.
I resumed my vigil.
The deadline was looming, and I could feel the strain on my soul. It was a tightness in my chest, a warning that I needed to get moving.
Yet there was another source of pain that somehow eclipsed it all.
I noticed Sage’s clothes from my periphery, splattered in blood from the werewolf bikers. She hadn’t been hurt—well, aside from the stress—but the fight had been messy.
Normally, I wouldn’t care how my bounties showed up. Nine times out of ten, they were covered in their own blood or piss anyway.
But I didn’t want Sage to have to deal with that.
She deserved better. She deserved dignity.
I took out my phone and checked the time. It was three in the morning, but I called the fucker anyway.
“Ronaaan…”
“Don’t ‘Ronan’ me, asshole. You knew who’d made that app the whole time.”
He broke down in a fit of high-pitched giggling. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Can you blame me for wanting to make some easy runics? But tell you what, as a gesture of good faith, I’ll do the next one for free.”
“I don’t care about the money!” I snarled. I saw Sage flinch from the corner of my eye and took a deep breath, calming myself down so I could speak softly. “If you had just told me you had the information, but it was worth six thousand runics, I would have paid you immediately, because you cost me something much more valuable—time.”
Time I could have spent with Sage before the end.
“Aw, shit, I didn’t think about it like that. I’m really sorry, dude.”
“Well, you can make it up to me now. I’m in Elmaris, at Orithiel Blessed Hospital.”
“Really? Everything okay?”
Sage shifted again, and I lowered my voice further to make sure I didn’t wake her. “It’s fine, I just need clothes for my bounty and some toiletries—toothbrush, toothpaste, whatever. Can you bring some over here in the next hour or two?”
“Clothes? What kind of clothes?”
“I don’t know, clean clothes. For women.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can do…”
I hung up, then walked over to Sage’s side, smoothing down her hair. It was a worthless endeavor—her curls were wild. But they were soft and silky in my fingers, and I couldn’t stop touching them.
Her eyes slowly blinked open. “Is it time to go?” she croaked.
I shook my head. “Not yet. Go back to sleep.”
* * *
Arlen actually showed up, much to my surprise. I hadn’t seen the omega elf in years, but despite what I assumed was pretty regular drug use, he looked good. His long, pale blonde hair wasup in a messy bun, tattoos covering his arms and creeping up his neck through the collar of his shirt.
He chewed on his pierced lip nervously as he eyed Sage, pulling at another piercing on the tip of his pointed ear. “I never met her in person, you know. She just contacted me with the code for her app and asked me if I could help her polish it up. All that other stuff I said was kraken shit.”
