Page 222 of Slashed Bonds

“Yup.” A click in the background, a lighter or a keyboard. “Sent the coordinates already.”

Relief goes through me like warm water. From the chest down, into the knees.

“You know I love you, right?”

“Obviously.” She hums it. The lighter again, or the keys. “But I may need a favor.”

“Talk to me.”

I’d help her regardless. If she’d called to say she couldn’t find him, I’d have said talk to me in the same breath. That’s how it is with Viper. The ledger between us stopped having numbers in it a long time ago.

“Are you free Friday night?”

“Probably?”

“Which of your three obsessed fuckers would follow you to a party?”

I stop.

That’s a good question. It’s a better question than she knows, or maybe exactly as good as she knows, and I have to think about it out loud because the answer isn’t obvious.

“If I’m thinking out loud.” I sit back down on the lounge. “Cassian’s out. By default. Cap’s not letting me go to a party to shake ass when somebody died of an overdose four weeks ago. He’d lock the door and sit in front of it.”

“Mm.”

“Niko, maybe.” I turn it over. “But he’s too trigger-happy. If somebody looked at me wrong he’d Switch on me, and then we’re not at a party, we’re at a crime scene.”

“Valid.”

I like that. She gets it. She’s met my Switch, twice, once on a bench and once in a hallway at three in the morning, and the two of them got along in a way that frightened the night staff.

“Kill,” I conclude. “If I ask sweetly.”

“Go on your knees when you do it.”

“Tempting.” I’m smirking at the wall. “Why, though?”

She’s quiet.

A long quiet, for Viper, which means she’s deciding how much of a thing to say, and I let her decide, because the alternative is pushing and Viper doesn’t push.

“I think your exes did that to Teller.”

My heart skips.

Not from fear. I check for fear, the way I’ve learned to check, and it isn’t there. The thing that comes up instead is hot, clean, and sits in the center of my chest like a coal somebody’s blown on.

Anger. Pure. Not a trace of anything else in it.

“Because of me?”

I ask it for clarification. Not for guilt. I’d like that understood by whatever’s listening.

“Honestly? Not sure.” I can hear her shrug. “Maybe because they can’t do shit to your three rejected knights.”

“Meaning.”

“Meaning your Alphas have connections for whatever this gala fancy shit is. Big ones. Word in the grapevine is they can’t be touched before then. Not a hair. Don’t know if it’s because of bets on you lot making semis, or money coming from somewhere nobody wants to upset, or what.” A pause. “But Teller wasn’t protected. Teller was a kid with a cast.”