Page 203 of Slashed Bonds

We Play To Ruin

~MORRIGAN~

“Okay, so where should we go nex⁠—“

The door chimes.

Heels on the floor. The particular click of a heel that costs more than my old rent, sharp, fast, a woman walking like the ground owes her something.

And then the scent.

My nostrils wrinkle before my brain’s caught up. Perfume. Expensive, floral, a white-flower thing laid on thick enough to be a wall, the kind of scent that’s designed to announce a woman before she’s in the room. It doesn’t mesh with anything. Not with the new foam and the blade wax and the tape. It sits on top of the store’s smell like oil on water.

Under the perfume, her own.

Honey gone sharp. Sugar with a wire in it.

No.

My body locks.

Every joint at once, the way a door locks when a deadbolt’s thrown, and I’m standing in the middle of Meg’s floor with two bags in my hands and my spine gone to iron, because I know that scent. I knew it in a kitchen on Alder Row when it came home on Theo’s collar. I knew it in a boardroom. I knew it from the ground, looking up.

“Listen, I’ll call you back. I have to go into this stupid store and deal with some equipment shit.”

The voice. Bright, bored, pitched for an audience that isn’t here.

“They want me on the ice for this upcoming photoshoot, which is preposterous given how expensive I am. What if I get hit by a fucking puck? Ugh. Knock on all the wood in the mansion.”

Naomi.

Maddie’s in front of me.

I didn’t see her move. One second she was at my elbow asking about lunch, and the next she’s planted between me and the door with her pink shoulders squared, and Viper’s come up on my left without a sound, close enough that her jacket brushes my arm. Shields. Two Omegas who clocked my body lock before I’d finished having it.

And Naomi Vance struts past all three of us without a glance.

Straight to the counter. The heels, the hair, honey-blonde and blown out like she’s walking into a gala instead of a hockey store, a camel coat that’s never seen weather, a bag on her arm with a clasp I could sell for a month of groceries. She puts both hands on Meg’s glass counter like she owns the glass.

The woman who orchestrated it. All of it. Who wanted four men like they were prizes at a fair and burned a girl down to get the tickets.

“I need the full set from the Arclight line. The articulated gloves and the matching sticks. I need the four, matching, and I confirmed this morning you had four in stock.”

Meg looks at her.

Slow. Over the reading glasses, with the chin-in-hand posture she’d been using on Maddie, except now it isn’t fascination. It’s a woman looking at a thing that’s tracked mud onto her floor.

“Sold out,” Meg says. “Sadly. About twenty minutes ago.” A beat. “I remember the call this morning. Abrupt. Rude, I’d have said, if anyone asked.”

Naomi huffs.

“If you remember the call, then you’d remember I asked you to hold them.”

“And I made it clear, on that call, that we don’t have a holding policy.” Meg’s voice doesn’t move. “High demand. Especially with the deals running.”

“Well.” A hand flips. “You shouldn’t be running deals if you’re so popular. It cheapens the brand.”

“Then you can go elsewhere.” Meg straightens, which for Meg is a declaration of war. “Somewhere that doesn’t see the need to be affordable to everyone. Not all Omegas are privileged with wealth, it seems.”