Page 193 of Slashed Bonds

CHAPTER 27

Why The Fuck Not

~MORRIGAN~

“Wait. The envelope’s for me?”

I’m freshly showered. I’d like that noted somewhere, because it took two women and a wall to accomplish it. Hair washed twice, up in a ponytail for the first time in a week, the red and black of it still damp against my neck. Clean clothes, new ones, black leggings and a soft gray thing with a hood that was folded on the lounge when I came out of the bathroom and that I’ve decided not to ask about. And I’m eating.

Chips. Some foreign kind Viper pulled out of her jacket, in a bag with a language on it I can’t read and a flavor I can’t name, salt and something sour and a heat that comes up a second late, and I’ve eaten half the bag sitting cross-legged on my own bed without noticing I was doing it.

I’m eating. Without being fed. Without a man watching. Look at that.

The pill’s working.

That’s the only explanation. Viper handed it to me before the shower, a small white oval out of a tin in her pocket, and said swallow, and I swallowed, and forty minutes later the bell in my head has stopped ringing and my hands are steady enough to hold a chip. I don’t feel like I’m dying. I feel like a woman who was dying yesterday, which is a different thing, which is a thing you can build a day on.

I didn’t ask what it was.

I don’t, with Viper. I never have. The girl was a pharmacist prodigy before she was anything else, before Bellwether, before the hair. She could tell you the half-life of a compound from the smell of it. She can look at a prescription and tell you which doctor wrote it and whether they were tired. She acts like none of that matters, like the obvious path, medical school, a lab, a Nobel for curing something, is a thing other people do, and I think I understand why.

Omegas don’t get to be in the fields that are supposed to help Omegas. That’s not a rule anyone wrote down. It’s a rule everyone follows.

So she doesn’t try. She knows more than the doctors and she rides a bike in the rain and she keeps her tins in her pocket, and when she gives you something you take it, because Viper has never once in her life given anything to anyone she wasn’t prepared to go to war for.

Medicine. Food. Stalking me across two counties to make sure I’m breathing. She’s that friend. The ride-or-die kind, for the three or four people on earth she’s decided to give a shit about.

And everyone else?

Everyone else can fuck themselves. She doesn’t care who they are or what they think they’re owed. You don’t get access to Viper. You get tolerated, or you get bitten.

Lone wolf. That’s the vibe. And it’s earned, the way mine is and the way Maddie’s is, because all three of us have a past we don’t talk about, and they’re all poison, and they’re all different.

Mine’s the loud one. Mine’s on a hundred thousand phones.

Maddie’s has kept its dark head down for a while. Long enough that people meet her and see the pink and the squeal and the hair and think she came out of a box that way. She didn’t. My bubblegum friend went through something that would’ve hollowed out most people, and she came out the other side kind, and social, and warm, and I don’t know how, and I’ve never asked, because she’d tell me if she wanted me to know.

And Viper is the icing.

The most mysterious of the three. The one I try not to linger on when I’m lying awake, because what I know of it is a handful of sentences she said once at three in the morning on a bench, flat, like reading a weather report, and the handful was enough to put a stone in my stomach that’s never fully left.

She’s a survivor. That’s the headline. The rest is a vendetta.

Because that’s what Viper’s past is. Not a wound. A list. A thing waiting to be punished, with a patience I’ve never seen in another living person, and the venom to do it when she decides the moment’s come. She’ll sink her teeth into those people’s lives and ruin every single thing they’re trying to build, one brick at a time, and she’ll do it so slowly they won’t know it’s happening until the roof’s on their heads.

Which is how it should be done. I’ve come to believe that. I’ve had five years and a boardroom to think about it.

“It is.”

Viper. From the desk chair. There’s a desk now, by the window, oak, with a lamp, and a chair with wheels she’s spinning a quarter turn at a time with one boot while she looks at me. Installed, I assume, while I was out of it. Things arrive in this room the way weather arrives.

The room’s getting cozier by the day. I keep saying that word now. Killian’s word. It’s the right one. Two weeks ago it was a bed and a bare wall and a dog on the floor, and now it’s a green velvet lounge under the window and a rug I can stand on in bare feet and a lamp and a fridge with a shelf labeled KNOX and a desk and, in the corner, my spot.

My spot. Look at me. A woman with a spot.

A beanbag the size of a small car, dark gray, and on top of it an onslaught of clothes that aren’t mine. Hoodies. A sweater of Cassian’s. A shirt I’m fairly sure is Nikolai’s because it smells like him and the collar’s been chewed. Are we going to ask who stole these clothes? We are not. I’m going to assume Knox did it, and Knox is going to stand there with his face and let me.

But when I’m not dying, it’s where I’ve been. Evenings. After practice and before whatever dinner the kitchen produces, I go up and fold myself into it with the Westmere tape or a book or nothing, and I lie there in a pile of men’s clothes, and I breathe.