Page 217 of Slashed Bonds

She’s being rebuilt. Row by row. And I’m on a balcony counting the bricks and finding I don’t feel like a man in a void.

I don’t want that to read like Nikolai wasn’t enough. He was. He is. The way a keystone’s enough until you learn what an arch is.

It’s different. That’s all. I’ll leave it there.

“Clearly,” I say, “I like to live on the edge.”

I take a long pull. Let it out slow, white into the cold, and hold the cigarette out to him.

He rolls his eyes. Takes it. Draws on it once, deep, like a man who quit and didn’t, and turns so his back’s against the rail and his face is to the sky. The quad lights catch the ink on his throat. A serpent, I think. Or a rope.

“Get to the point.” I say it without heat. “You’re not here to waste either of our time.”

A beat. Smoke.

“Those frat parties are getting out of hand.”

Flat. A statement about a structure.

“Young fuckers. Mostly athletes, or kids who want to be. They come to us for ink weeks later and their bloodwork’s still riddled with that shit. We can’t put a needle in them. The compound reacts.”

The compound. The thing in the pigment that bleeds slow into the blood and keeps three unbonded Alphas from going feral. It reacts with whatever’s in the orange bottle.

I frown. Slowly, I turn my head.

“You’ve been cancelling.”

“We’ve been cancelling.” He blows smoke at the stars. “I’m not risking the license and the livelihood for some rich nepo babies who can’t tell a party from a pharmacy.”

That gets a smirk out of me. One side. I look away from him, back down at the quad, and I let it sit, because Dox doesn’t come to a balcony to complain about his schedule.

“You’re telling me this because someone’s connected.”

“What if I told you,” Dox says, to the sky, “that the douche and his pack who hurt your girl are the ones running the drug shit.”

Bingo. Fucking bingo.

I turn my head.

Slowly. All the way, until I’m looking at his profile, and he’s already looking at me, and there’s nothing casual in it. His eyes have gone dark the way they go when he’s reading a piece onto skin, and under the dark there’s a hunger I recognize, because I’ve seen it in my own mirror.

He wants them. Not as a client. As a project.

Which means one thing.

“Did this touch Vix?”

It has to. That’s the only wire that makes Dox move. He runs a shop and a floor and whatever else runs under that, and none of it has ever made him walk across a quad at midnight. She does. He pretends otherwise, the way men pretend, but that woman is the load-bearing wall of his whole life and anyone who’s watched him for ten minutes knows it.

I don’t know the half of what she does on the side. I know her pole classes at Volkov Athletic fill in six minutes when she posts one on a Wednesday afternoon for no reason. I know you have to be a particular kind of badass to do that in this town, in this decade, as an Omega with a needle in one hand and a chrome bar in the other.

“Close call.”

Two words. That’s what he’ll admit to, and I read the rest off his face. His pack stepped in. Somewhere, at some party, something was in a bottle meant for her, and three men who don’t lose their tempers lost them, and they weren’t happy about having to.

And they can’t kill anyone.

Which is why he’s on my balcony. Isn’t it.