"Don't compliment my mother. She'll put you on the Christmas card list and then you'll never escape."
His thumb moves. One small circle against my spine, right at the dip above my hips. Absent. Automatic. Like he doesn't know he's doing it.
My throat closes.
Tomorrow morning. The contract says tomorrow morning.
The blood-stained napkin is still in my purse. I wrote it myself in hasty charcoal at a sticky tavern table while a troll bled on the floor three feet away. Three days. Fake boyfriend. Wedding duration only. Terms clear. Payment rendered.
Tomorrow at ten a.m., he collects his gear, walks out the door of the country club, and goes back to whatever dark and violent corner of the world needs a six-foot-nine mercenary with a broadsword and no attachments.
The gold is already spent. The job is almost done.
His hand tightens at my back. Pulls me closer. My cheek presses against his sternum. The shirt is wrinkled, half-unbuttoned, streaked with ash from the kitchen fire and pinkfrom strawberry coulis. Under the ruined cotton, his skin radiates heat like a furnace.
"You're quiet," he says.
"Enjoying the music."
"You hate this song. You told me in the van. Track four on your sister's playlist. You called it, and I quote, 'sonic wallpaper.'"
Of course he remembered. He remembers everything. He catalogued my family tree in twenty minutes on a dark highway. He memorized my frosting recipe by watching me make it once. He filed away a throwaway comment about a throwaway song and stored it in whatever terrifying tactical database lives behind those amber eyes.
"Maybe I changed my mind."
"About the song?"
"About a lot of things."
We don't speak for eight bars. The vocalist stretches a note into silk. Brass swells underneath. His boots move with absurd grace for their size, carving slow patterns around my smaller steps, never once threatening my toes.
The fairy lights paint gold across his jaw. His tusks catch the glow. The scar that runs from his left temple to his chin looks almost soft in this light, like a river on an old map.
Fourteen hours.
That's what's left. Fourteen hours of warm hands and cedar. Fourteen hours of feeling small in the only way that has ever made me feel safe instead of lesser. Fourteen hours before the napkin contract expires and the mercenary collects his things and the baker goes back to her van with no passenger door and a shattered windshield.
My fingers curl into his shirt.
"Magnolia."
"Hmm."
"You're gripping my shirt like it owes you money."
I loosen my fingers. Smooth the wrinkled fabric. "Sorry. Habit."
"Don't apologize. Grip harder if you want."
The band shifts tempo. Slower. The standing bass pulses like a second heartbeat. His hand slides two inches lower on my back. My breath catches. Every nerve ending along my spine fires in sequence, a cascade from my skull to the soles of my feet.
He pulls me tighter. My body fits against his like a key in a lock, like the universe designed one of us to be a wall and the other to lean against it.
His chin rests on my head.
Fourteen hours. And then this giant, impossible, terrifying, gentle, infuriating creature walks out of my life with gold and a silk necktie that still smells like griffin.
My eyes burn.
