Steelhands - Jaida Jones [220]
Didn’t much mind seeing her use it, though. It wasn’t all guile, just an attack from the side route, like I’d been lecturing about a few weeks back.
“Do I strike you as the kind of man to go back on a deal?” I’d asked. I didn’t even have to fake sounding put out, since I was still thrown off my kilter by that look.
Magoughin had always said there was something dangerous about a pair of green eyes. It was a shame I couldn’t tell that horse’s ass how right he’d turned out to be.
“Guess not. I have to sort a few things out a little first,” Laure’d concluded, sucking it up and taking it like the perfect soldier.
Yeah, I’d thought. We were gonna get along great.
I even told her as much—private, so Gaeth wouldn’t hear it. It was something I’d never even said to one of my boys because they’d all needed less encouragement, not more, when they’d come to me.
“Looking forward to working with you,” I’d said, then we’d shaken hands on it. There was something about the way she’d held my hand that suggested she might’ve been interested in a friendlier kind of good-bye, but whatever else I was, I’d never been the sort to go carrying on in the street where you didn’t know who was watching. Call me old-fashioned, but some things just belonged behind closed doors where a man couldn’t get arrested for it. And besides, I was giving her the same respect as a commanding officer gave a soldier who’d done a job right. Anyway, she was grinning when I’d left her, so I figured she didn’t take it the wrong way. It was a first step. And if it turned out we ended up getting more familiar with each other up at the Greylaces’ estate, Royston was never gonna let up on riding me.
After that, I’d gone back to my office. It was still so early in the morning that there was hardly anybody up; classes wouldn’t start for a while yet, and Radomir wouldn’t be coming for at least an hour. Maybe, if he’d heard about my arrest, he’d decide to take the day off.
I just had a few things to get in order—not that I’d ever seen fit to spruce the place up or bring anything of my own in, but there were essays and excuse notes and that kind of thing scattered all over the place. I gathered ’em all together and put ’em in a heap for Radomir to sort through, or whatever poor, hapless, miserable bastard inherited this job from me now that I was finished with it.
The semester wasn’t over yet, so I signed a piece of paper that said I was quitting, and for all I cared my donkey-brained assistant Radomir could be in charge from now on. As far as I was concerned, he could teach the students any way he liked—that is, if there was anyone in the world able to teach ’em anything, now that the only one who was worth her salt probably wasn’t going to be attending classes anymore. That alone took away all my reason for staying.
Then, because there wasn’t anyone in the world who could fire me now and I’d held it in for too long, I added, If you want a bunch of half-wits scoring high on essays and going through life thinking they know something, that is. We’d better hope, if there’s another war someday, these piss-pants aren’t involved with any of the decision-making. And if they are, I ain’t fighting. Then I signed it ex–Chief Sergeant Owen Adamo, and left it on my desk.
It felt good, ’cause I was officially free. I’d suffered through this horseshit way too long to respect myself, but I was gonna have to get some of my dignity back now if I wanted to do this job, this real job, that actually meant something to me.
Why’d I even put up with this in the first place? I wondered. I guessed I’d been missing my girl so much that I’d figured there wasn’t anything I could do that was better, and my life the way I liked it had ended right there in the lapis city, on the other side of the Cobalt Mountains.
I wasn’t the sort of man who liked taking pleasure out of other people’s misfortunes. It was why I hadn’t joined in on all the parades in the streets, whooping it up ’cause the enemy was beat. Now that so many people’d been hurt and so