Page 107 of Slashed Bonds

But…

Having her approval on this is scarier than anything else in the building.

Because Maddie doesn’t approve of things.

Maddie finds the fault line.

That’s her whole gift.

She looked at three Alphas for forty minutes this morning, and she’s looked at me for four days by phone and one by eye, and instead of finding the crack, she’s sitting on a couch telling me I look happy.

If Maddie approves of these fuckers staying in my orbit…

…that could mean they’re potentially meant to be mine?

CHAPTER 13

Famished

~KILLIAN~

“Where’s Monarch?”

I ask it from the doorway, with the door open the two inches he leaves it and my shoulder against the frame, and what I get for my trouble is Nikolai at his desk with his arms crossed over his chest and his head tipped back, dozing.

One eye opens.

Lazy. Upside down, from the angle he’s got his head at, so he’s regarding me from the top of his skull like something that’s crawled up the wall.

“Is that what you’re calling her now?”

I roll my eyes.

It’s his word. Not mine. He said it on the phone from his closet three weeks ago, before any of this, before she had a name: she must have been a butterfly once. And then in the lobby, watching her put him on his knees, I thought: not any butterfly.

A monarch flies three thousand miles on wings that weigh less than a paperclip. It crosses a continent on nothing. It arrives somewhere it’s never been, at a tree its grandparents died on, and it knows the tree.

That’s her. Something that shouldn’t have made it and did, and came back to the exact place, and knows the tree.

I haven’t told anyone the reasoning. I told Niko the name, once, in the dark, and he’s been using it against me since.

The tension between us is obvious. It’s been obvious for three days. It sits in the hallway like weather, and everyone in the house has walked through it and pretended they haven’t, and I’m done pretending, which is why I’m standing in his door.

Three days.

Three days since Roz put her on the roster, and Mori has been a force in this house that I don’t have a structural term for. Not loud. She’s never loud. She moves through the building like a change in air pressure, and every man in it has adjusted without noticing he’s adjusted.

Thursday night, two in the morning, I came down for water and found her in the kitchen with every cupboard open and the contents on the counters in rows.

Not cleaning. Reorganizing. Glasses by height, cans by label, the spice rack alphabetized, the fridge rules taken off the door and rewritten in her handwriting with the eight crossed-out ones removed and a ninth added: NOBODY TOUCHES THE DOG’S FOOD.

She didn’t look up. She said, “It was wrong,” and kept going.

I got my water. I didn’t offer to help, because she didn’t want help, she wanted the cupboards to be right, and I know that feeling in my body the way I know a load path. I sat on the stairs for forty minutes and watched her make it right.

She does this. Fixates. Catches on a thing and can’t put it down until it’s finished. Nobody told me that. I’ve been keeping a file.

By Friday, the second line was calling her Malice to her face and putting their dishes in the correct cupboard without being asked.