Page 238 of Slashed Bonds

“Thank the fuck.”

I shift her. Princess style, one arm under her knees and one behind her shoulders, and her head rolls into my collar and her breath goes warm down the inside of my shirt, and I follow him.

He doesn’t say a word. Out the side door, past the propped window with the shoe in it, across a strip of dead lawn to a black van idling at the curb with its side door already open. I climb in with her. He climbs in after and pulls the door, and the bass cuts off like a thrown switch.

“And how much,” says a voice from the front, “did you let her drink?”

I turn my head to acknowledge Valerie.

And stop.

Because the face in the dome light isn’t Valerie’s. Valerie’s beside it, wine-red ponytail, arms crossed, in the passenger seat turned backward. But the one who spoke is sitting on the bench across from me with a tourniquet in her gloved hands, pulling it taut, testing it, and looking at me over it with the calmest green eyes I’ve ever seen on a human being.

Green. They were gray. She’s wearing contacts, and she’s wearing them like a statement.

“Viper?”

I say it the way you’d say the name of a problem.

She’s amused. It gets to her mouth, the black of it, a quarter inch at one corner, before she gets to the point, because Viper has never once not gotten to the point.

“I need intel. And frankly, Mori tolerates alcohol well enough.” She loops the tourniquet over her hand. “It’s Malice we should all be worried about. So I decided to tag along. For the plot.”

“Plot, my ass.” Valerie, groaning, shaking her head. “She’s here to make sure your girl doesn’t go full withdrawal. And I’m here to support Mr. I’m Going Out.“

She tips her chin at Dox.

I look at him.

He shrugs.

“Are you going to fight your girl?” he asks me. Pleasant. Like it’s a question about parking.

I think about it. For one honest second, I think about it. Then I think about the way she grinned at Theo Ross across a dance floor an hour ago with the whole of her weight on a stool she couldn’t feel.

“Nah.” I let my head fall back against the van wall. “I’d rather be drugged.”

“Thought so.”

Dox taps the partition twice. The van moves.

I let them work.

Viper has Mori’s arm before the first turn. The tourniquet above the elbow, two fingers finding the vein in the crook with the speed of someone who’s done this a thousand times in worse light, a cannula in with no more fuss than threading a needle, and a line running up to a bag she’s hung from a hook in the ceiling that I’d bet money was installed for this. Something clear. A second syringe into the port, something that isn’t clear, amber, pushed slow while she watches Mori’s face.

“For the hangover,” Valerie says, catching me watching. “And the other thing. Whatever she had before you got there, this’ll take the edge off coming down.”

The other thing. The taper. Lessard’s chemistry hasn’t started and the old chemistry’s gone and she went into a frat house with nothing in her blood but a tin in her bra.

I’m not worried about these two having their hands on her. I’d trust Viper with a scalpel over most surgeons. It’s the rest of it I don’t like. How risky this was. How many people in that house had a phone, and how long she was alone on a stool, and how close I came to being upstairs when she went down instead of in the hallway.

Three minutes. If the jackets had been three minutes slower, I’d have been in a bedroom with a phone in my hand and she’d have been on the floor by the washroom.

I’d had sight of them from the floor. Two Halbrook crests going up the stairs with a girl between them, a small Omega in a yellow dress whose feet weren’t doing the whole job of carrying her, and I’d kissed Monarch and left her dancing in a cloud of my scent and gone up after.

Dox’s men were already there.

Two of them, at the top of the landing, both inked to the jaw, both leaning on a wall like they’d been born against it. They let me past. The room at the end of the hall had the door shut and a light under it, and when I opened it the two jackets were on their feet with their hands up and the girl was on the bed, dressed, breathing, with her eyes rolled to white and a cup on the nightstand.