Page 242 of Slashed Bonds

Two men at the gate.

Standing in the drive under the carriage-house light with the gravel at their feet, not moving. One in a gray hoodie with his arms crossed. One in gray joggers and nothing else, barefoot on the gravel in the cold, with his hair standing up on the platinum side and a look on his face I last saw from the floor of a flooded ring.

“Fuck.”

Valerie giggles.

“You fucked up,” she says, delighted, “thinking you could pull this shit without either of them finding out. But I commend you.”

“So you’ll write a wonderful eulogy for me. Yes?”

“And that’s where I fail you, friend.”

She laughs and nudges Viper, who’s pulling the cannula out of Mori’s arm with the same speed she put it in, pressing a square of gauze over it, and then a bandage. Green. With a small black spider printed in the middle.

Cute. Branded. Of all the things.

“You should’ve drunk more whisky,” Viper says, without looking at me. “But look at you. Being a good committed Alpha. Because you’ve got a life to live for now.”

Fuck.

She knows. I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell anyone but a man on a balcony with my cigarette in his hand, and that man is sitting beside me pretending to look at the gate, and I don’t think he told her either. She grasped it off the air. Off the way I carried a woman into a van.

Dangerous. That’s the word. Dangerous in a way Naomi Vance has never been in her life, because Naomi needs money to be dangerous and this one needs a phone and a bench.

“Let me go get beat up.”

I lift Mori off my lap. Hand her across to Valerie, who takes her the way you take a sleeping child, and I open the van door and get out into the cold and the gravel.

And before I’ve reached the two of them, before Nikolai’s taken a step, I put my hands up.

“Mori’s okay.”

It comes out fast. A summary. The way you report a shift to a coach who’s already decided you fucked it up.

“We danced the night away. We didn’t get to fuck, because she got shitfaced. I didn’t get shitfaced, because I was protecting her. We got intel, and we got a phone, and we got a girl in a yellow dress to Lessard before she stopped breathing.” A breath. “Don’t fucking box me up.”

Nothing moves.

“Oh.” I add it. “And I’m quitting smoking.”

Out of all of it, that’s the piece that lands.

They both look at me like I’ve lost my mind. Cassian’s arms uncross a half inch. Nikolai’s mouth comes open. The phone in my jacket and the drugged girl and the intel, those go past them like weather, and the thing that stops them both dead on the gravel is a man saying he’s putting down a cigarette.

I look at Nikolai.

Up, and down. The bare feet. The joggers. The hair. The eyes with the sleep still in them, red at the rims, two shades of furious.

“Damn,” I say. “You look like shit.”

“You fucking drugged me.”

“The grand power of melatonin gummies.”

“YOU said it was CANDY.”

I smirk.