Page 150 of Slashed Bonds

~MORRIGAN~

Kissing Nikolai is like pulling the pin on a grenade.

You know you’ve got a few seconds. You know what’s coming. And there’s a thrill in the knowing, in standing there with the pin in your hand while the count runs down, that nothing else in my life has ever matched.

Sloppy. Breathless. In a gym with sand on the floor.

This man doesn’t care where he is.

That’s the thing I’ve noticed. A lobby, a locker room, a hallway with half a roster watching. If the action is affection, he gives it every ounce of conviction he owns, with no regard for the room, and he never once tames it or holds a piece back for later.

He gives his all. In everything. I’m starting to understand it’s not a performance. It’s the only setting he has.

And I’m starting to embrace that.

Hell. Dare I say it. Love it.

The problem is the pace.

Nine days. That’s what I’ve had with these men. Nine days of a captain handing me a tablet at eleven at night, a defenseman stepping over my dog in his doorway, a goaltender putting a glass of water on a nightstand. Nine days of dedication from three strangers that four boys I grew up beside, who smiled at me across a thousand rinks for twelve years, never once managed.

And it’s produced this odd sense of belonging that I didn’t ask for and can’t put down.

It frightens me. Again. Still. It’s fast. It’s addictive. It’s teasing a future I’m not sure I’m ready for, and I keep waiting for the moment I pull away from it.

Will I?

I wonder that, with my palms flat on his chest.

He’s wet. Sweat still running in beads down the freckled plane of his sternum, over ink, over the pale map of his skin, warm under my hands and shaking slightly with whatever he’s been working out of himself for two hours.

I’ve never seen him like this in daylight. Not in a lobby, not through a hoodie, not in the two-inch crack of a door at night. Here, under the high beams of a boxing gym, he’s all of it at once: the two-tone hair plastered to his forehead, the jaw, the freckles I’d only ever found by touch, the body of a man who stands in a painted rectangle and lets people fire rubber at his head for a living.

He’s fit in a way that makes me giddy. That’s the word. Giddy. I’d like it struck from the record and I can’t strike it.

There’s a scar on his left side I’ve only ever read with my fingers. Under the ribs, a straight line, surgical, old. And a piece of ink above it that I’ve never seen in good light, that he keeps turned away from me in bed, that I’m looking at now in the high beams and still can’t read because the angle’s wrong.

His first. Killian said once, through a wall, that he’s never shown anyone the first. I’m not going to ask. I’m going to be the one who’s there when he turns around.

He’s been thinking about something that’s bothering him. That’s why the bags are on the floor. He came here to let the steam off, and so did I, and maybe that’s what brought me down the stairs toward a sound I’d normally have walked away from.

Three of them. I counted on the way in, over his shoulder, before he’d opened his eyes. Split along the seam, sand in a fan across the mats, the fourth on its chain still swinging, and no blood on his knuckles, which means he wrapped them, which means the breaking wasn’t careless.

A man who wraps his hands before he destroys something isn’t out of control. He’s letting something out on a schedule.

I know the difference. I’ve been the thing on the schedule.

I needed to think. I needed to hit something.

Instead I’m kissing an Alpha with everything I’ve got at seven in the morning, and we both know damn well we’ve got a game tonight.

The house was wrong when I woke.

Not wrong. Empty in a way it hadn’t been. Nikolai’s bed cold beside me, which happens, since he doesn’t sleep on the bad days. But the hall was quiet too, and the captain’s door was shut with no light under it, and Killian’s was open with nobody in it, and the truck was gone from the lot.

My truck. Gone. With my keys on the hook by the door where I’d left them, and a note under the hook in the captain’s handwriting that said BACK BY NOON, and nothing else.

I stood in the kitchen with the note for a while. Maddie was asleep on the lounge couch with Greenie on the floor beside it like a dog, and I didn’t wake either of them. I put on shorts and a tank, and I took the kickboxing card out of my jacket for the first time since a masked man handed it to me in a locked room, and I walked four kilometers in the dark to a converted mill on the river side of town because the card had an address on the back and I needed somewhere to put my hands.