Page 188 of Slashed Bonds

“W-what?”

I don’t understand. I’m holding the paper and looking up at him upside down and the words don’t fit together.

“We moved everything from here. Days ago.” A pause. He lets it sit, lets it find a place in the spiral my mind’s become. “Cassian’s orders. Killian saw the deadbolts Sunday night. The chair. He came back and said the place was a target, and Cassian said then it doesn’t get to be one, and we started Monday.”

I stare at him.

“Figured they’d try it,” he goes on. His thumb’s still on my cheek. “Typical. It’s what they do. They burn things. Timing could’ve been better, I’ll give them that. But beggars can’t be choosers, can we?”

He smirks.

And it’s a threat. The whole shape of it. A slow, cold, carnivorous thing that has nothing to do with me, that’s aimed over my head at four men in a car somewhere on a highway, and I’ve never been so glad to see an expression on a face in my life.

“So…”

I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to hope and be wrong. I’ve hoped before and been handed a window.

“All your things are at the Viper House.” Flat. Precise. A man reading an inventory. “In your room. We knew you were locked in. You wouldn’t have gone home before the game, you never do. So we had it delivered from the storage unit this afternoon, while you were asleep on Cassian on that lounge you haven’t thanked anyone for.”

His voice is robotic. More machine than man. And his hand is on my face wiping another tear as it falls.

“The cot’s gone. You don’t need a cot. Everything else is in boxes under the window. Knox’s bowl. Your Switch. The box of letters you keep under the floorboard that you think nobody knows about.” A breath. “So the real losers tonight are those fuckers. They burned an empty building.”

An empty building. They burned an empty building and left a note on it.

I make a sound. I don’t know what it is.

His other hand comes up. Both of them on my face now, holding my head still, upside down between his palms, and he leans down and kisses me.

Tenderly.

There’s no other word, and it’s the wrong one for him, for Nik, for a version of a man who doesn’t own an ounce of affection and has never spent one. But that’s what it is. His mouth on mine, soft, careful, like I’m the thing in the house that mattered and he’s carrying me out.

“So let this chapter burn to ash,” he says against my mouth. “Because this is the last fucking time anyone tries to hurt what’s mine.”

I don’t know what to say.

I don’t know how to react. The tears are running now, both cheeks, no stopping them, into the collar of a sweater that smells like a man I’m not with, with the paper crushed in one fist and a fire going out behind me that I’d stopped watching.

“But…”

It comes out of me like something broken. Because there’s a wall, and I’ve lived behind it for five years, and I know every brick.

“But… but…”

I can’t bond. There’s scar where the receptor was and a drug that burned the rest. We can’t be together. Not the way a pack is together. This arrangement, whatever we’re calling it, can’t⁠—

“What is broken can always be rewritten.”

He says it into my lips. Like he heard the whole thing. Like he’s been standing on the other side of the wall for five days listening to me recite the bricks.

Then he pulls back.

Enough that I can see him. The whole of his face above me, inverted, the fire behind his head like a crown, those two eyes looking down into mine without blinking.

“Morrigan.”

A beat.