Page 226 of Slashed Bonds

And she reaches over and wipes it.

With two fingers. Then her whole hand comes up and lays itself against my cheek, and her thumb moves under my eye and catches the next one, and the next, and I let it. I sit there on a grave with a woman’s palm on my face and I let her take the water off it.

Her hand’s small.

I didn’t know that. I’ve had that hand around my throat and on the back of my neck and on my chest at three in the morning in a dark kitchen, and I didn’t know. On the ice she’s a force, a thing that moves other things, and the body that does it reads as big. Here, in this quiet, surrounded by the dead, with her palm not covering half my cheek, I can see how small she is. How much of her is fragile under the fierce.

And it does something to the arithmetic I’ve been doing for five weeks.

I can’t lose her.

Not I don’t want to. Can’t. The way you can’t lose a limb and go on being the same shape. She’s in our orbit now, the way Evie was in mine, moving things by being in the room, and the idea of her leaving it, the idea of our pack being a pack that doesn’t have her as ours, puts a thing in my chest I haven’t felt since I was seventeen on a couch with no feet under my leg.

Over my dead body.

That’s not a figure of speech. I’d like it written down somewhere.

We’re silent a long time.

She lets me cry and doesn’t make anything of it. Doesn’t shush. Doesn’t say the words people say. Her thumb moves when it needs to and stops when it doesn’t, and the music keeps going in my ears, and the frost melts under both of us.

They say men shouldn’t do this. They say it like it’s a virtue. And that’s how we end up where Killian ended up, and where Teller ended up, and where I’ve ended up every year on this day for three years. Where does it go, the thing you won’t let out of your chest? It doesn’t leave. It sits there, rots, turns into a pill or a fist or a bottle in a drawer.

I let it out. On a grave. Into a small hand. Nobody dies of it.

When we stand, the sky’s lower.

Afternoon going toward evening, the gray turning the color of a bruise at the edges. She puts her hand in mine without asking and I close mine around it without thinking, and we walk up the slope toward the gate the long way, along the ridge where the cemetery looks out over the valley.

Fall’s happening down there.

The whole valley’s gone to it. Hills in red, in rust, in a yellow like something burning slow, folding down toward the river in rows, with the road a gray thread through them and the town at the far end going on with its evening, lights coming up one at a time. Beautiful in a way I only notice here. Only on this day. Like the valley’s holding a sign.

I look at it for a while. Then I ask the only question I’ve got.

“How did you find me?”

“Viper.”

That’s all she says.

And it’s funny. I smirk at the valley, because it’s exactly right, and I nod like a man who’s been told a fact he already knew. That girl is probably the most dangerous of the three of them. Maddie can make eleven thousand people feel a hip check. Mori can take a wall away from a man who’s standing on it. But Viper can find a truck in a cemetery twelve minutes from campus with a license plate and a phone, and she’d do it for either of the other two without being asked twice.

Note that. We’re going to need her.

“My sister died three years ago.”

I say it to the valley. Then I turn and say the rest to her, because she deserves my face when I say it.

“Evie. You’ve heard the name. You’ve got the shape of it, from a hill at five in the morning when I was too angry to tell it right.” I squeeze her hand. “Here’s the rest. She was raped by a pack. Four men who’d made the initial agreement to marry her, who’d sat in my father’s house and eaten his food and shaken his hand, and then decided otherwise, because a deal fell through and there was a higher bidder. Somebody’s daughter with more attached to her. They thought the new one was more enticing. They didn’t want to let the old one go without getting something out of her first.”

Mori’s face doesn’t move. Her hand does. It goes tighter.

“She got pregnant.”

I stop.

It’s still hard. Three years and a brush and a bottle of water every autumn, and the word still goes into my chest like a hand. I look at the valley until it comes back.