Page 134 of Slashed Bonds

And I don’t like the captain seeing me in any version of weak. I’ve built a whole life on the principle that nobody gets to see that, and in six days he’s seen the bathroom floor, the loading dock in my face, the panic, the breath I didn’t let out.

The piggyback isn’t even the summit. The crash-out is the summit. The piggyback’s base camp.

Knox met us at the bottom of the hill.

Flat out, ears back, the way he runs when he’s decided something’s wrong and is going to fix it with his body. He hit the path in front of Cassian and stopped dead and looked up, and I watched him do the arithmetic. Me, on the captain’s back. Not struggling. My face in the captain’s neck.

He didn’t growl.

He hasn’t growled at any of them since the first night. I keep a list. I keep it the way I keep the lipstick list, as a language with its own grammar, and the grammar says that the dog who put himself between me and every official-looking uniform for five years has looked at three Alphas and decided they’re furniture.

He turned and walked ahead of us the whole way to the house, three paces in front, checking back every ten steps, like a man clearing a route.

He’s never done that for anyone. Not the shed. Not Maddie. He did it for the man carrying me, and I’m going to have to think about what my dog knows that I don’t.

Cassian didn’t say a word on the service road. Not one. He carried me past the athletics complex with its glass gone gray in the first light, and up the back steps, and through a kitchen with my handwriting on the fridge, and up two flights, and the only thing he said the entire time was at the top of the stairs, when my legs locked for the second time and I made a sound.

“I’ve got you.”

Three words. Flat. Not a comfort. A report.

On the path, after the song, he hadn’t said anything either.

He’d let it play out. The whole track, the drop and the burn and the long collapse at the end, with his hands on my face and his eyes not moving, and when it finished he took the headphones off me the way you’d take a bandage off a wound you weren’t sure had closed. Slow. Watching.

Then he’d held out his hand for the phone.

I gave it to him. I don’t know why. He locked the screen without reading it and put it in his own pocket, and that was the whole transaction, and it’s still in his pocket now, on the bathroom floor, and I haven’t asked for it back.

A 2:13 text in the captain’s pocket. Whoever’s holding that gas-station phone has no idea who’s holding theirs.

“Fuck you,” I huff.

He doesn’t react to that either. Six days, and I’ve said it to him four times, and every time he takes it like a man accepting a pass he was expecting.

In defeat. I sink lower, until the water’s at my chin and the bubbles are at my ears, and I let my eyes droop.

Exhaustion doesn’t cover it.

I’m drained in three directions at once. Mentally, from the tree. Physically, from four kilometers and a hill and a crouch on frost that soaked through to the bone. Emotionally, from the thing I did in front of him, the thing I said, the sentence about two lines that I’d never said to a living person.

The only good thing in this room is his company.

That, and the fact that he isn’t judging me.

The water’s doing a thing to the scars.

It does this. Heat brings them up, the ridges on my forearms going from silver to pink to a dark angry rose, raised and shining, the way they looked the week they healed. I’ve got both arms under the surface and I can see them through the bubbles, eight lines, same angle, same length.

He can see them too. He’s looked. He hasn’t looked away, and he hasn’t looked for long, and he hasn’t asked, and the combination of those three things is a kind of manners I didn’t know existed.

The moth’s above the waterline. The ink doesn’t change with heat. It sits on my throat exactly as dark as the day it went on, and under it the scar does what the arms do, and I can feel it, a warmth at the back of my neck that’s almost a hand.

Almost. Not. Nobody’s hand. I’m in a bath.

I thought he’d throw me off the team.

That was the read, on the service road, with my arms around his neck. That I’d get back to the house, and get warm, and get a sentence from the captain about how a program on conduct review can’t afford an Omega who holds her breath on a trail, and I’d pack the truck and go back to the shed.