Page 236 of Slashed Bonds

“We don’t claim you.”

Flat. Fast. The voice he used in a boardroom.

“We never fucking wanted you. You’d never have been picked.”

“And did you say that,” I ask, “when you were balls-deep, coming in me?”

His face.

“When you needed me to stay on the ice. To keep you in the leagues. When my presence on your roster was the salvation that kept four mediocre Alphas in a bracket, and my devotion to the sport you lot loved and yearned to prosper in was the only reason anybody with a clipboard looked twice at Halbrook?” I tilt my head the other way. “My existence is useless now. But it was the leverage you needed to stay relevant, all that time. Wasn’t it.”

He says nothing.

I watch his throat. The Adam’s apple going up and down. And his hand, which has come up from his side and is six inches from my neck, fingers half-curled, the hand of a man who’s done this before and knows exactly where to grip.

I don’t move.

I don’t flinch. My eyes stay locked on his, and the hand stays where it is, and he pauses.

Not because of my eyes. I’d like it to be my eyes. It isn’t.

I watch his gaze slide past my shoulder. Fix on something behind me, across the room, and hold there. And whatever he’s seeing makes the hand drop.

I grin.

A giggle gets out. The room’s spinning now, slow, like a rink seen from the ice when you’ve been hit, and I’m aware that I don’t want to pass out within arm’s reach of this man. I’d wake up in a bathtub missing a kidney before I woke up anywhere he could call his.

“Tick tock, Buttercup.”

I hum it. A nursery rhyme. The way you’d sing it to a child.

“Your time’s coming up, Theo. And when I ruin you pieces of shit to the ground, you’re going to wish you’d burned my hut with me inside it.”

He glares.

“You’re drunk,” he says. Quiet, for the first time. The voice he used in a kitchen on Alder Row when he wanted a thing and knew he’d get it. “You’re drunk and you’re alone and you’ve got a smart mouth, and you’ve forgotten what happens to it.”

“I’m not alone.”

“The convict at the bar?” A smile that doesn’t reach anything. “He’s got a record and a blindfold and a dead mother, Mori. He’s not a pack. None of them are. They’re three strays who found a stray.”

He’s done his research. Good. Then he knows what strays do when you corner them.

“We’re not a pack,” I agree. Sweetly. “We’re a pit of snakes. And you’re standing in it.”

I touch the tin through the dress. Once. A reflex, the way you touch a pocket to check your keys. It’s there, two pills against my ribs, and I don’t need it, the spinning’s whisky and whisky only, but my hand wanted to know.

His eyes have gone to the kitchen door. Then the stairs. Then back to me, and there’s something new in them, under the rage, a flicker I’ve never once seen on Theo Ross in five years of reading his face.

He’s looking for his boys. The two jackets. They were by the kitchen an hour ago and now they’re not, and he’s wondering where, and the wondering’s the first thing tonight that’s scared him.

Good. Wonder, Theo. Wonder where they went. Wonder who went after them.

And I grin like the maniac I am, and I blow him a kiss, and I wink, better this time, the whisky’s gotten the hang of it.

This isn’t how I thought vengeance would feel.

I’d imagined heat. Screaming. A thing that comes out of you all at once like the sprinklers coming on. This isn’t that. This is cool, patient, almost pleasant, a woman planting a seed in October and knowing, with the whole of her body, that in the coming weeks everything will come down. While I lay my silk. While I weave a web so intricate and so beautiful that the prey who deserve to feel it won’t see a single strand until they’re wrapped and still, and I’m sitting down to eat.