The smell hit me the moment we turned onto our street.
Not gradually. All at once, the way it must hit anyone who didn't live with it — a wall of warm concentrated scent that the city's ambient noise did nothing to dilute. I'd been away for a few hours and my nose had reset enough to receive the full impression.
Strong was one word for it.
"Wow," Caleo said, still holding my hand. He stopped walking for a full second to take it in with the focused professional attention of someone conducting an assessment. "It really does smell like cum here." He paused. "I would know. I'm an expert."
"I know," I said. "You've mentioned it."
"Have I?"
"Ten times," I said. "In ten days."
He considered this. "Consistent data," he said.
I squeezed his hand and we kept walking. I was already thinking about the money — sixty, maybe seventy gold between us now, more coming with each week's production. Enough for something better than a modest two-story in the merchant district. Something with a courtyard that wasn't visible from the neighbor's window. Better ventilation. A crafting room with two drains instead of one. The other side of the city where nobody knew us yet.
"We should find somewhere else," I said. "Something with more air. Better space. We have enough now to put down on something nicer — maybe take a loan on a really good place if we find the right one."
Caleo made a sound of agreement. "Away from the Guild's district would be tactically wise," he said. "And more room for the operation."
I let go of his hand to reach for the door.
It was already open.
Not wide. Just slightly, maybe two inches, the latch not seated, the door resting against the frame with the specific quality of something that should have been closed and wasn't. I stood there with my hand in the air not touching the handle and felt my stomach do something specific and cold.
I had locked it. I was certain I had locked it. I locked it every time, the warrant visit having made that a reflex.
I turned to Caleo without speaking and put a finger to my lips and pointed at the gap.
His eyes went to it. Something moved behind his face — the lamp going down, the Martin Short energy shutting off cleanly, replaced by a focused stillness I hadn't seen in him before. He leaned close to my ear.
"Around back," he breathed.
I nodded.
We went over the low courtyard wall without discussion, both of us moving quietly with the careful coordination of people who had spent two weeks navigating a small house together in the dark. I came up to the crafting room window and went slowly, staying below the sill, and lifted my head just enough to see through the glass.
Two men.
Both with swords belted at their hips. Both with cloth pulled up over their mouths and noses — the smell, I registered distantly, they'd come prepared for the smell — moving through my crafting room with the systematic efficiency of people who knew what they were looking for or were trying to figure out what they'd found. One of them had his hands on the shelf. The other was at the table, turning things over, examining.
I watched the one at the shelf pick up a vial of Golden Salve and hold it to the light.
Then he pocketed it.
My stomach dropped through the floor. Not because of the theft — though yes, that too — but because of what followed from it. If that vial got to someone who knew what they were looking at, someone who ran it through a testing machine or had it assessed by anyone with real alchemical knowledge, the trail led somewhere specific. Not to an ingredient list. To a producer. To the only two people in the city who could make it, one of whom had a unique magical class that the system had explicitly warned him could result in capture and exploitation.
I had a very clear image, sudden and complete, of a room. Of being in that room for a long time. Of producing on demand rather than by choice.
Caleo's hand found my wrist and gripped it hard. One look at his face told me he'd arrived at the same image from the same direction.
I moved away from the window.
I dropped my trousers.
"We need to get rid of them," I said, very quietly. "Both of them. Now."
Caleo looked at me for exactly half a second. Then he dropped his trousers too, Maximus swinging free, the smaller ring at his base already beginning its warmth, the canine cock filling out with the focused efficiency of someone who had made a decision and was implementing it.
I had never killed anyone before. I want to be clear about that. I was nineteen years old from Ohio and the most violent thing I had done before this world was argue with someone at a drive-through. But they were in my house. They had taken something that could lead someone directly to me. And the alternative — the room, the milking, the indefinite captivity — sat in my chest like a cold stone and made the calculation very simple.
We had been practicing in the courtyard. Cumshot had evolved with consistent use into something I could deploy at meaningful charge without manual stimulation — the ring had developed enough sensitivity to my intent that at sixty percent or above I could fire maybe ten shots with the focused precision of someone pointing a weapon rather than performing an act. Caleo had developed his own version through the bond, his output different in character from mine — faster, lighter, more rapid-fire, less the single concentrated impact and more a sustained volley. Different tools. Both effective.
I went around the corner first.
The man at the shelf heard my footstep and turned.
He looked at me. He looked at what I was pointing at him. His brain tried very hard to process the situation — a lean young man, barefoot, trousers around his ankles, thirteen and a half inches of charged horse cock aimed at his chest with the focused intent of someone who had thought about this and was committed — and it was still processing when I fired.
The Cum Shot hit him center mass.
The sound it made was part splat and part crack, the impact audible as something structural, and he went down clutching his chest, the vial tumbling from his pocket and skittering across the stone floor but not breaking. He thrashed for a few seconds with the desperate energy of someone whose body was reporting catastrophic information, and then he stopped.
Caleo came around the other side.
The second man had half drawn his sword before Caleo's first shot caught his shoulder and the second caught his throat and the third and fourth followed in rapid succession with the staccato efficiency of someone who had done the math on stopping power and applied it. More watery than mine, faster discharge, each impact less of a single devastating blow and more of a cumulative overwhelming force. The man went down in stages and didn't get up.
The room went quiet.
I looked at Caleo. His canine cock was still out, still charged, a thin drip running slowly down the tapered tip. My brain, which had just watched two men die and should have been occupied exclusively with that, took a brief unauthorized detour to think about putting my mouth on that drip and licking slowly upward.
I wanted to lick his cock clean so badly it was actually annoying given the circumstances.
I pulled myself back. Two bodies in my crafting room. Our crafting room. The vial still on the floor where it had skittered from the dead man's pocket. I made myself look at all of that instead.
It worked. Mostly.
I sank down against the doorframe slowly, my back finding the wood and sliding down it until I was sitting on the cold stone with my knees up and my hands doing something slightly unsteady that I wasn't fully in control of.
We had just killed two people. The cold stone under me was real and specific. The smell was real. The two men on the floor were real and very still.
I knew it was the right call. I knew it with complete clarity — the vial in the dead man's pocket, the room in my head, the specific cold certainty of what capture would mean. I knew it and it didn't help with the shaking.
Caleo came and sat beside me on the floor. His shoulder found mine and stayed there, solid and warm, and his arm went around me from the side, pulling me against him, and he held on.
"Shh," he said quietly. Not performing calm. Just steady. "We're okay. We're okay, Jack."
I breathed through my nose and tried to get my hands to stop.
"I've never," I started.
"I know," he said.
"They would have—"
"I know," he said again. "You know it too."
I did know it. That didn't make the room stop smelling like it did or the two men on my floor less still. I sat with Caleo's arm around me and breathed and waited for the shaking to run its course the way shaking always does eventually.
He held on the whole time.
After a while he looked around the crafting room with those blue eyes taking everything in — the two bodies, the shelf, the spilled vials, the general comprehensiveness of the situation — and the problem-solving part of him that ran underneath everything else was clearly running the numbers.
"We might need to leave the city," he said quietly.
I looked at the bodies.
I looked at the shelf, at the remaining vials sitting there in their careful rows, at the Compound Tonic glowing its deep amber-threaded gold in the afternoon light, at everything we'd built in two weeks.
"Yeah," I said.
The ring pulsed once at my base. Not warm this time. Something more urgent.
"How fast can we pack?" I asked.