Page 145 of Slashed Bonds

No. Skinning wouldn’t be enough. Skinning’s fast. Whatever we do to the four men in Halbrook needs to last days, with pauses, so they have time to understand each stage before the next one arrives.

But we’re doing this Cassian’s way.

Because that sick bastard is the leader of our pack and the captain of our team for a reason, and the reason is that he thinks in months while the rest of us think in seconds.

Like father, like son. And Cassian’s daddy dearest is a mastermind with a gift for waiting.

Patience. That’s the thing none of the rest of us have.

Which is why I’ve spent two hours in here breaking equipment, because I can’t do what I want to do, and what I want to do is take four lives apart with my hands.

Here’s the one thing I’m grateful for, out of the whole three-hour recitation of our girl’s lore at two in the morning on a bench behind the house.

Cassian’s father paid.

The hospital. The transfer. The surgery that gave her back her legs. The shed in the forest she’s been calling home for five years.

Do any of us approve of the shed? Fuck no. Two rooms, a loft ladder, one working element on the stove, eleven kilometers of pine in every direction and a lock she checks four times a night. We’re changing that. Immediately. I don’t give a fuck what she says about it.

Killian saw it first. Drove out Sunday night without telling anyone, because that’s what Killian does, and came back at midnight and sat on the end of my bed in the dark and described it to me in nine sentences, and the ninth one was about the lock.

“Four deadbolts. Inside. And a chair under the handle, worn in a groove on the floor from being put there every night.”

He didn’t say anything after that. He didn’t need to.

That’s where Cassian and Killian are now. At the shed, with the truck, loading her life into the bed of it.

She has no idea. She’s going to find out when she gets back to Viper House and her books are on shelves in the room at the end of the hall, in height order, because Cash will have done that, and her journals are in a locked drawer, because Killian will have done that.

And if people are already losing their minds about her name on a roster, then we play the game now. We protect what’s ours.

Dangerous sentiment. What’s ours. I’m aware.

We’re claiming her. Nine days in, and we’re claiming her, and I know how that sounds, and I don’t care how it sounds.

Because the world’s been cruel to her. The way it’s been cruel to each of us. It left scars on our skin. Tools in our heads that we didn’t ask for and can’t put down. It burned off whatever compassion we carried in as children, and it left three men at the bottom of a moral barrel who’ve made their peace with the dark.

And now we’re going to be the pillars. Around whatever light she’s got left.

I stop.

Stand there with my fists up and my chest heaving, and stare at the fourth bag swinging on its chain, and I think about three hours on a bench.

Her pack. The doping. The setup. The window.

Everything.

And then what we do about it. Three tiers, in Cash’s phrasing, which is how Cash phrases everything. The ice in November. The record, with lawyers. And the third one, which he looked at Killian while he said, and which Killian received with the stillness of a man who’s been waiting four years to be assigned a job he was built for.

Her call. That’s the clause. She points, we move. Cash was clear about the clause.

I agreed to it. Out loud. On a bench. I’d like that noted, for whenever the clause gets tested.

Cash laid it out the way he lays out a game plan. Flat. In order. No adjectives. Here’s what happened and here’s when and here’s who, and he didn’t look at either of us while he did it, because he knew that if he looked at us he’d have to stop.

And then he showed us the evidence.

Video.