Page 245 of Slashed Bonds

Punishment. He said punishment, on the gravel. Nikolai said deal. I’ve never once in my life been so sorry to have been unconscious.

There’s a small silver key on the nightstand beside my water. On the coaster, next to the glass, like it was placed there by someone who knew somebody would need it in the morning and didn’t want it lost in the sheets.

And there’s a bite on Killian’s shoulder, high, where the neck meets it, in the spot he’s decided is his on me. Fresh. Purpling. Nikolai’s, by the width.

So that’s what the deal looked like. I’m not asking. I’m going to find out in the group text, in Russian, and I’m going to have to get it translated.

Knox isn’t in the room. I’d have felt eighty pounds of him by now. He’s somewhere in the house, in a dog bed with a jersey in it, or across a doorway, or on my beanbag in a pile of stolen clothes, sleeping off a night of guarding a house that only had Maddie in it.

Four of us. One bed.

I let that land, lying there with my cheek on a man’s chest and two more men a reach away. Five weeks ago there was a fourth room on this floor with the dust kept off it and nobody to put in it, a wound they walked past. And now there isn’t a fourth room. There’s one bed that four people fit in, badly, with a pair of handcuffs in the middle of it, and nobody’s walking past anything.

This is the nest. Maddie had the word and I had the room and neither of us had the picture. This is the picture. It’s not a room. It’s wherever they are.

Something in my chest does the thing it did on a frozen ridge with my hand in his. The loosening. The knot finding its end.

And a thought under it that I’ll only have once, lying still, before the day starts and takes it.

If they’d found me five years ago. If a loading dock had happened at eighteen instead of a boardroom. Would there have been a window at all?

There’s no answer to that. There’s a man’s heartbeat under my ear and a goalie swearing in his sleep and a defenseman who’s decided to live, and the question goes where the questions go, into the place behind my ribs, and I close the door on it gently this time instead of slamming it.

“What are you smirking about,” Cassian says into my hair, “when you’re in trouble?”

Low. Rough with no sleep.

“I don’t think I should be in trouble.” I say it to his collarbone. “Arguably.”

“Mhm.”

He watches me. I can feel him watching, the weight of it, and I lean back enough to look at him properly, and his eyes are tired. Not the kind of tired a night makes. The kind that’s been accumulating.

“Did you sleep?”

“Not much,” he mumbles.

“Aww.” I put a hand flat on his chest, over the four letters I still haven’t asked about. “I worried Captain. My bad.”

“You regret nothing.”

“Not a damn string of regret.”

“Five drinks,” he says. Not a question. “On a taper. With nothing in your stomach but Viper’s chips. In a house with four coolers of the thing that killed a kid on my roster.”

“Whisky. Poured in front of me. From a bottle a sixteen-year-old watched like it was his inheritance.” I hold his eyes. “I broke one rule, Cap. One. Killian had three and I kept two.”

“You were on a stool alone.”

“I was on a stool in a cloud of his scent so thick a man would’ve needed a permit to approach.” I let that sit. “And a man did approach. And he didn’t touch me. Because of the cloud, and because of what was standing at the bar behind me.”

Cassian’s hand stops in my hair.

There. That’s the thing he hasn’t been told. Killian carried me out and told them about a phone and a girl in a yellow dress and a cigarette he’s not smoking, and he didn’t say the name, because the name’s mine to say.

“Theo was there.”

Nothing moves in his face. That’s how I know it’s landed. Cassian doesn’t move when something lands; he goes to the stillness he goes to on a dot, where the whole world narrows to a hand and a puck.