Page 125 of Slashed Bonds

And the Vipers are temporary. But maybe.

Maybe they’d take care of him. If I was gone. He sleeps on Killian’s doorstep. He lets Nikolai rub his belly. Cash carried his bed up two flights…

They’d fight over him. That’s the truth. Three Alphas who can’t share a hallway would end up in a custody dispute over an eighty-pound dog with a chewed stick, and Roz would have to mediate, and Maddie would post it.

And he’d be loved. Loud, badly, by too many people. Which is more than I’ve managed.

I take a breath.

A nervous one. And then I don’t let it out.

At Bellwether there was a girl on the third floor who did this. Held her breath in group until her lips went blue, and the orderlies would count, and at forty she’d let it go and laugh, and everybody would laugh, and nobody would say what it was.

Okafor said it once. To me, in the hallway, after. “That’s not a game. That’s a rehearsal.”

I told her I understood. I didn’t. I do now.

I wonder, in the part of me that’s watching all this from a distance, whether if I hold it long enough it’ll invite the end. Whether I can pull the drowning in from the outside. Whether there’s a version of this morning where I keep going under and don’t reach for the surface, and the surface stops being a thing I’m required to reach.

It’s almost tempting.

My lungs start to burn. I hold it anyway. I wait for the darkness at the edges, the way it comes on the bathroom floor, and I lean toward it, and I wait for my consciousness to catch up with what I’m doing…

Something soft closes over my ears.

Cushions. Warm. Foam and leather, settling against the sides of my head with the gentleness of a hand, and I know the shape of them before I know anything else, because I’ve seen them around a man’s neck every day for two weeks.

A hand stays on the side of the headphones for a second. Steadying them. Steadying me. It’s warm through the leather, and it doesn’t move to my face, or my neck, or anywhere a hand would go if it wanted something.

It stays where it is, and then it goes.

Then the song.

It starts quiet. A voice, close, in the register of somebody asking a question they’ve never dared ask out loud. The words are about a life held in someone else’s hands. About whether that someone would save it, if they had the choice. About being afraid, and not being able to say so, and lying awake with the fear pressed down under a pillow.

I know the song. I’ve had it on a cracked phone at two in the morning more nights than I’d admit to a therapist.

It was on the phone in the truck the night I drove to Blackridge. It was on the phone the night I got Roz’s card. It was on the phone in the parking lot behind Hollow Creek the first time I sat in the cab afterward with two hundred dollars and nowhere to be.

He’s been in my truck. Or he’s been in my playlists, which is worse.

Or he heard it through a wall. Thursday night, two in the morning, in a house with walls built for horses, a woman in the room next to his with a cracked phone at low volume, pretending she was asleep.

He reads faces. Everyone knows that. Nobody told me he reads walls.

He knows I know it. There’s no other reason to choose it.

Then the drop.

Violin first, a single line rising, and then drums under it like a heart remembering what it’s for, and then the guitars come in heavy enough to shake the frost off the ground, a wall of sound that takes the whole gray morning and sets it on fire.

My breath goes out of me in a rush.

I didn’t decide to let it go. The sound decided for me. My lungs pull air in on their own and the dark at the edges of my vision backs off a step.

My eyes open.

Slow. Tears are still running, down cheeks that have gone hot in the cold, and the path is a blur, and there’s a shape in front of me on the frost that resolves as I blink.