Page 126 of Slashed Bonds

Kneeling. One knee down. Black hoodie, hair tied back, glasses on, because it’s five in the morning and there’s no roster to hide them from. Bergamot and burnt coffee and charred cedar, reaching me through the cold, and underneath it, warming, amber.

Cassian.

CHAPTER 16

Let's Make Them Pay

~CASSIAN~

My instincts have never once let me down.

Not on a faceoff dot. Not in a boardroom with my father’s lawyers. Not at two in the morning with my ear against a wall.

And this morning, they’ve been proven right again.

Four-fifty. Rounds. Niko’s door, cracked its two inches, and the bed with one body in it instead of two, and the dog sitting up at the foot of it looking at me like I’d been slow.

Her boots were gone from the mat. Her jacket was on the hook. Running, then. In the dark, in the cold, alone, on a morning when the thing on her phone had a hot spot in Halbrook.

I didn’t decide to go after her. I was on the service road before the decision arrived.

I ran the route backward. Around the lake the wrong way, so I’d meet her instead of chase her, and I was at the top of the hill by the oak when I saw the shape on the path below, crouched, arms around its knees, not moving.

Not moving is the read. Everything else is detail.

I came down the hill without sound. I’ve spent four years learning how not to be heard by men who’d hit me for it, and it turns out the same skill works on a woman who’d have run if she’d heard me coming.

The phone was in her hand. Screen lit. I didn’t read it. I didn’t need to. I’ve had the same number on my own screen for three days.

And she wasn’t breathing.

That’s the moment. Not the crouch, not the tears. The chest that wasn’t moving, and the face that was waiting for something, and the four seconds it took me to understand what.

I had the headphones off my neck before I’d finished understanding.

I’m kneeling on frost. My headphones are over the ears of an Omega who smells like the epitome of hopelessness, and I have the distinct, physical fear that if I let myself blink, she’ll be gone when my eyes open.

Not gone from the path. Gone from herself.

Few people know what that scent is.

Not the base notes. Anyone can learn those. Black cherry, plum, night jasmine, a thread of winter under it that shouldn’t be there and is. The pleasant part. The part that makes Niko stupid and Killian quiet.

I’m talking about what happens when it turns.

How a scent is a drawing. Thin lines, laid down carefully, the way a person’s life is laid down over years. And how, when the person starts to come apart, the lines don’t vanish. They go wrong. They scribble. The pencil presses harder and harder until the line stops being a line and becomes a scrawl of chaos, and then the tip breaks, and there’s nothing on the page at all.

I can smell that. It’s not a gift. It’s what you get for spending your childhood in a house where somebody’s scent was breaking every day and nobody said a word.

I’m looking into Mori’s eyes now, and I can see exactly where the pencil tip breaks.

She’s on that edge. The chaos has her by the collar.

And yet.

In those dilated, hopeless eyes, there’s something else, and it’s small, and it’s the only thing in this whole gray morning worth kneeling in frost for.

A flicker.