Flashback!
“Look, ma’am,” Lucas drawled, politely keeping his hands where the client could see them, “Liberty Lair isn’t just bragging when they say they’re thief-proof. They’ve got guards, they’ve got traps, they’ve even got spells. They’ve got people watching all the time, and they’ve got somebody watching those people. Most of all, they’ve got a dragon. Shoot, the dragon’s in charge, and she’s smart. Whatever you’re planning, for your sake I hope it’s not a smash-and-grab.”
The client smiled, thinly. Like Lucas, she was elvish, and claimed the name of “Two-Eyed Elanor” — but she talked like an Old Louisville lawyer instead of a Ladezel buccaneer, or even the more civilized tones of Lucas’s own Elf-Lands Delta gentry. “As I explained, Mr. Coltrane: I cannot give you the full details about the item we require until I at least have your signature on a nondisclosure agreement. Rest assured, though, we do expect that acquiring it will require skill, effort, and discretion. Which is why we’re ready to pay quite handsomely for it.”
“Yeah. A little too handsomely. You throw that kind of money around but won’t say what for, folks start to wonder if the job has teeth, and how many bites out of them it’ll take.”
…and now I want to see the story where a setup like that leads to the protagonist saying “no”, the lady heading off to find someone else, and then the protag dealing with the fallout of the whole thing exploding in an extraordinarily messy way a few days later.
Also, how the heck is a “nondisclosure agreement” supposed to have *any teeth at all* when the entire point of it is to keep someone from going to the authorities who’d be adjudicating the pertinent contract dispute?
This is a fantasy story, my friend. ‘Teeth’ is not necessarily a metaphor. 🙂