Page 223 of Slashed Bonds

“Interesting,” I whisper.

And I mean it. Untouchable. Three men who’ve spent four years being the thing the conference wanted to get rid of, and now there’s a wall around them nobody can see, and the wall has a date on it.

The gala. Everything has the gala on it. Naomi’s marriage. The subsidiary. Dox’s leak. And now a wall around my men that comes down the night after.

“It’s an advantage for us,” Viper goes on. “To get information. But I need to catch those fuckers in the act of still wanting to ruin you. On a camera. In a room. Not a note under a rock.”

“Aww.” I hum it, like she’s told me she’s proud of me. “You want me to be bait.”

“Evidently.”

“At least you’re honest.”

“I try to be.”

She’s shrugging again. I can hear the leather.

“Deal.”

I say it before she’s finished the shrug. Because I love risky shit. I’ve loved it since I was eleven on a pond with my father yelling from the bank, and five years of a chair under a door handle didn’t cure me of it, it concentrated it.

“But if I OD and die for real, that’s on you.”

“You of all people know I’ve got an antidote for that shit.”

“And yet you haven’t cured cancer. A shame.”

“You and I both know I have.” Flat. A weather report. “I’d be found dead in Saudi Arabia or some shit.”

“I mean…”

I trail off. Because she’s right, and we both know she’s right, and there’s a laptop in her bag with a formula on it that she’s never going to publish because publishing it would get her a bullet.

“Yeah. Fuck.” I rub my face. “I like you alive, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” The lighter, for sure, this time. “I’ll send the details. Go to your man.”

We say the goodbyes we say, which is her hanging up and me saying bye to a dead line, and I sit there a second with the phone warm in my hand.

Then I open the coordinates.

A pin. Blue, on a map, twelve minutes from the house by the look of it, north, past the edge of campus where the roads stop having sidewalks. I zoom in. The pin’s sitting in a field of gray, a shape with a wall around it and a gate on the road side and rows inside the wall, straight, even, the kind of rows nothing living grows in.

I frown.

“A cemetery?”

CHAPTER 33

Always, Cassian

~CASSIAN~

The stone’s clean now.

It took twenty minutes. A bottle of water from the truck, a rag I keep under the seat for the purpose, and the small brush with the soft bristles that gets into the letters. Lichen comes up along the north edge every year no matter what the groundskeepers say they’ve done, and every year I take it off with my thumbnail and the brush, and every year the granite underneath is the same gray it was the day they set it.

EVIE MARGUERITE VANE.