Page 149 of Slashed Bonds

Her.

The woman I’m angry for. The reason for three bags on the floor. Standing in front of me in the gym I own, on the Omega-only floor I built, in black shorts and a black tank, with a kickboxing card I gave her in a locked room two weeks ago sitting in her jacket pocket somewhere, used for the first time.

Her hand’s on my cheek.

Her eyes are on mine.

And fuck. This woman. This Omega. This strong, ruined, magnificent piece of work in a world that did everything it could to her, is here. Present. Standing. Her palm against my face and her eyes giving me an ounce of attention, a pinch of something I’d call love if I were brave enough to use the word, and admiration, and I’d put my hand in a fire for either.

She’s looked at the bags. I watch her eyes go to them and come back. Three on the floor, split, sand in a fan across the mats, and she doesn’t ask, and her face doesn’t do the thing faces do when they see a man who’s been breaking things.

She’s seen men break things. She’s deciding whether this one’s breaking them at her or for her. I watch her decide.

“Daddy home?”

Her voice barely reaches the surface of the room.

It’s all I can hear. All I can focus on. All I can want.

I’d go to the grave for this woman. I don’t care anymore. Nobody gets to hurt her again. They’ll have to put me six feet under first, because those wings deserve to be adored after everything she’s flown through to get here.

I don’t answer her.

My hand moves instead. Slowly. Up off my side and along the line of her neck, and I watch her freeze, the whole body going still the way it does, the animal deciding whether to bite.

She doesn’t pull away.

Our eyes are locked. I keep going, slow, until my fingers are at the back of her neck, under the hair, over the moth, over the scar under the moth, and I cup it.

Barely.

The grip’s hardly there. The presence of a hand, no weight in it, resting on skin that’s been touched there by exactly one set of people in her life and all of them betrayed her for it.

I wait.

For her to pull away. To react. To reject me, which she’d be right to do, which I’d take without a word and without offense.

And what I find, instead, is the most powerful thing I’ve ever watched a person do.

She stays.

She plants her feet. I watch her do it. I watch her force herself to remain, to hold my eyes, to stand inside a hand on the back of her neck while every demon in her head begs her to drop or run or swing, and she does none of it.

She’s fighting them. For me. In a gym with sand on the floor.

“You’re going to be ours, Mommy.”

I whisper it in a voice I don’t recognize. Raw. Deep. Coming from somewhere under the register I normally use, with nothing in it but the truth.

Because I mean every word.

And then I close the distance and kiss her like it’s the last thing either of us will do on this earth.

Our Monarch. Our Malice. Our Omega, who we’ll find a way to claim, and prove that one man’s trash can most certainly be another’s glorious treasure.

CHAPTER 20

Train Me, Daddy