Page 235 of Slashed Bonds

And maybe that’s why I can look this man dead in the eye, the man who stood at a window, and not feel the slithering hate I’d expected to feel.

Only I do.

Deep down, under the numb, in the part of me she hasn’t turned off, I do. I want to ruin him. I want to slice the flesh off him in strips. I want to slash every opportunity that’s reaching toward him to make him great and leave him standing in the pieces the way I stood in the pieces of a shed.

Five years without a playoff. Five years of a program with four Alphas and an empire behind it and not one postseason game. That’s karma, served cold. And this year he had to buy a bracket to get one.

It’s not enough.

He deserves more. More irony. More of what I had.

I finish my drink.

In one swallow, which from the way my body’s buzzing was already the wrong move, and I set the glass down and slide off the stool, and the room’s a degree off its axis and I don’t care.

I walk.

Through the floor, through the bodies, moving my hips as I go the way I was moving them against Killian, slow, rolling, a rattlesnake in a black dress. Except a rattlesnake gives you the sound first. A rattlesnake tells you it’s about to strike.

I’m not rattling, Theo. Watch my hips and figure out why.

By the time I’m in front of him, I can see the rage.

Pulsing. Behind his eyes, at the hinge of his jaw. And I read it the way I read a shooter, because I had five years of reading this man’s face for weather, and I know what the rage isn’t. It isn’t that I’m here. He expected to see me eventually, the way you expect a bill.

It’s that I’m here like this. In a room where he can’t show his colors. Fucking thriving.

“You think you’re winning?”

He says it over the music. He doesn’t need to. I’d hear the disdain in that voice through a wall, through five years, through a door with four deadbolts.

“Think?”

I toss it back. Tilt my head, the way Naomi did at Meg’s, because I’ve learned things.

“Oh, Theo. My Alpha.” I hum it. Then I correct, and I let the correction take its time. “Ah. Ex-Alpha.”

His mouth opens a quarter inch. Breathing through it. The tell before a draw, and he doesn’t know he does it, and I’ve known since I was eighteen.

Eight days. That’s the number in my head as I watch his mouth. Eight days until he bends over a dot across from Cassian Vane with ten thousand people and every camera in the conference on his hands, and his mouth will open the way it’s opening now, and Cassian will have the puck back on his stick before Theo’s lungs have filled.

And on the far side, Dorian’s going to slide to the weak dot like he’s done since juniors, and I’m going to be standing there already. And the whole building’s going to hear a pass hit shin pads.

I could tell him. I could lean in and whisper every tell he has and watch him try to unlearn them in a week. I don’t. A woman planting seeds doesn’t dig them up to show you.

“The father,” I say, low, so he has to lean to catch it, “of a child that never got to see the light.”

He bites his bottom lip.

And I love it. God help me. I love the way that spot grinds his gears, because I know his darkest secrets, every one of them, the way you know the drawers in a house you lived in. How he’s wanted kids since he was a boy himself. How his family’s trouble runs on the male side, not the female, three generations of Ross men with a problem nobody says out loud at dinner. How, if I ever got pregnant, it would be a miracle.

And it was. And look where it went.

“I’m a victory in this petty game of vengeance.” I lean in. Giggle, soft, close to his ear, a sound with something cruel living in it. “Don’t you think?”

Nothing.

“These slashed bonds couldn’t stop a rejected Omega like me from thriving.”