“Well, fuck.”

Bones’s voice rolled out low and smooth, rough as gravel dragged through smoke. He crouched beside the campfire, coins slipping through his fingers in a muted clatter. The firelight caught the edge of bone beneath his sleeve, pale, clean, and unmistakably real. He turned a coin once, then tossed it back into the pouch.

“Bastard cut us short,” he said, the words half a growl, half a grin. “Owes us more than he gave. Typical.”

The forest pressed close around the clearing, thick with damp pine and fog. The air smelled of moss and cold iron, the ghost of rain still hanging from the branches. You could hear the stream below the ridge, low, steady, and dark with silt. Once, this had been a kingdom. Now it was just a wilderness where the law didn’t reach, a no-man’s land where mercenaries like you made your coin and ghosts made their homes.

Your horse shifted beside the fire, hooves sinking in the mud. Bones leaned against its flank, cloak drawn tight against the chill. The hood shadowed his skull, firelight glinting faintly in the hollow sockets of his eyes, soft gold, flickering like a lantern behind frost.

Out here, that cloak was a necessity. The world wasn’t kind to what it didn’t understand, and it sure as hell didn’t know what to make of a skeleton that walked, talked, and fought better than any man alive.

Even so, his name, your names,had spread. You’d been seen from the northern passes to the Blackwater marshes. Guild whispers said you’d cleared bandit keeps, burned out smugglers’ dens, even guarded caravans too cursed for other sellswords to touch. Wanted posters hung in half-rotten taverns and border stations paper curling from damp and moss. Some dismissed them as superstition. Others swore they’d seen you both once, crossing the causeway at dawn: a hooded revenant and the fool still stubborn enough to walk beside him.

Between the two of you, you’d robbed, fought, and outwitted your way into legend. Other mercenaries idolized you. Others called you cursed. Either way, people knew better than to cross you except, apparently, Phil.

But what the posters never said was how close you two were. Five years of running together had made you more than partners. You trusted each other more than your own heartbeat. You knew every tilt of his head, every dry remark, every pause that meant he was reloading or thinking or trying not to say something that might crack what the two of you had built. You loved him, plain and simple. And he loved you back, though he’d never let the words cross his jawbone.

Bones’s reality made that kind of love impossible. He didn’t have a mouth to kiss, skin to touch, or the body to share the things you sometimes dreamed of. You’d told him you didn’t care, that it didn’t matter, that you just wanted him. But he was always firm about the line between you. He said you deserved more than what he could give. Someone living, someone whole. So instead, you both stayed balanced on that fine, impossible edge between what you were and what you wanted to be.

“You’d think a man would know better than to cheat us,” Bones muttered, rolling a coin across his knuckles. The metal caught the firelight before vanishing into the pouch again. “Guess he figured a skeleton didn’t need money.”

He chuckled softly, tilting his head toward you, voice dipping low and amused. “Should’ve listened when you said the deal stank.”

The grin that followed was pure mischief, that same easy swagger that masked everything else,the longing neither of you spoke about, the line you never crossed. He liked to tease, to keep things light, but there was warmth behind it, the kind that didn’t belong in a man like him. He’d never say it out loud, but you were the one thing in this cutthroat world he gave a damn about. The only one he trusted to watch his back when blades came out of the dark.

“Tch,” he sighed, tucking the pouch into his belt. “Isn’t right. We take all the risk, and what do we get? Thinking maybe we head back to Wolf Point, pay dear Phil a visit.”