Page 229 of Slashed Bonds

“Why do I feel like you could get away with murder?”

He looks at me then.

Smirks. Puts the cigarette between his lips and takes a long pull on it, and the end doesn’t glow, I notice that, no orange, and he lets the smoke out slow and white through the inch of window.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

I roll my eyes.

But I’m looking at the cigarette. The end’s wrong. The paper’s wrong, too smooth, and the smoke doesn’t smell like the smoke that comes off him on the balcony. It smells like nothing. Like cold air with a memory of mint in it.

I reach for it.

He lets me. Opens his fingers and lets me take it out of them like it’s nothing, and I turn it over in the dashboard light and it’s got a seam in it and a small light at the base.

“This isn’t a cig.”

“It’s that nicotine fake shit.”

Flat. An announcement. The way he says everything he doesn’t want to talk about.

I look at it for a long moment. A plastic thing with a light, in the hand of a man who’s been smoking on that balcony every night since the quad filled with cruisers.

“You’re trying to quit?”

He doesn’t answer.

Nikolai had been on the couch when we left. Flat on his back with one arm over his face and Knox across his shins, breathing the slow breath of a man who’s gone down and won’t be up for hours, and I’d stopped in the arch and looked at him and thought he’d fallen asleep after dinner.

He drugged his man. His man. Because his man would’ve followed me here and put a boy’s face through a window the first time one of them looked at me, and then none of us would be untouchable, gala or no gala.

I don’t know whether to be angry or to kiss him for it. I settle for both, later.

And there’s a thing under the anger that I’ll look at some other night. He did it to protect Nikolai from himself. Not me from Nikolai. He’d rather his man wake up at three in the morning furious on a couch than wake up in a cell, and he made that call alone, without asking either of us, the way Cassian moved my shed without asking.

They keep doing that. Deciding, and carrying it. I keep letting them. I’m going to have to decide whether that’s the pack or the problem.

We share a look. The long kind, the kind this man and I have been having since a lobby with a trophy case in it, where nobody blinks and nobody looks away and the silence does the talking. And I lean in, because the silence has said enough and I want the words.

“Who are you quitting for?”

His eyes are on mine.

Then they drop. To my mouth. And stay there a second before they come back up.

“You.”

One word. No hesitation in it. The same way he’d say the load on a wall.

Oh.

I don’t say anything. I put the fake cigarette to my lips, because my hands need to do something, and I pull on it the way he did, and it’s cold, dry, and tastes like a pharmacy, and I let it out and my whole face cringes.

“This is shit.”

He snickers.

A low chuckle, out of his chest, the kind I’ve heard maybe four times, and he takes the thing back out of my fingers.