Page 258 of Slashed Bonds

Both of them. Maddie and Viper, at the same volume, which is a volume Viper doesn’t have, and they’re staring at me like I’ve grown a second head and the second head’s said something interesting.

“Are you for real thinking of being serious with them?” Maddie squeals. Pink hands over her mouth. “Mori. MORI.”

“I’m ready to get my ass kicked on the pole, please.”

I raise my hand. For added measure. Like a girl in a classroom who’d rather do the hardest thing in the room than answer the question on the board.

Valerie laughs.

Shakes her head, the ponytail going, and comes off the pole with one hand and puts the other on my shoulder and pushes me, gently, deeper into the fold, until my forehead’s on my shin.

“Look into buying that shit up,” she says.

Over my head. To the room. Her voice has changed, and I can hear it even with my face on my leg, a thing in it that wasn’t there a minute ago, a darkening, a smirk with weight behind it.

“Who knows what evidence is lingering in a building like that.” A pause, placed. “For a certain Omega to leak out. When the time is right.”

Oh.

Oh, shit.

The cameras. A two-story building with a lobby and a fountain has cameras, in the lobby and on the stairs and on a long balcony with a view, and a woman who owned the building owned the footage, and footage that’s been sitting on a server for five years waiting to be deleted by someone who kept meaning to is a thing that transfers with the deed.

The pack laughing. Cassian has that. From a screen. From a room. He doesn’t have the window. Nobody has the window but her.

Viper’s phone is already out. I didn’t see her reach for it. She’s typing with her thumbs, fast, the green nails she painted to match the contacts moving over the glass, and she doesn’t look up when she speaks.

“Listing’s through a shell. Registered Tuesday. The shell’s owned by another shell. The second shell’s registered agent has the same mailing address as a certain accountant who takes phone calls in changing rooms.” The thumbs stop. “She’s selling it to herself. Moving the asset before the creditors find it. Which means she thinks nobody’s looking.”

“Which means somebody should be,” Valerie says.

“Which means somebody with a Black Amex and a captain who says anything you desire should be.” Maddie’s eyes are enormous. “Oh my GOD. Mori. You could own the building she threw you out of. You could put a plaque on it.”

“I’m not putting a plaque on it.”

“You could put Knox’s bowl in the lobby.”

“...I’m not ruling that out.”

Six days to a semifinal. Five to a gala. And now a deed, with a hard drive behind it, and a shell company with an accountant’s address, and a woman in plum telling me to buy the room I was thrown out of with money that belongs to a man who’s downstairs at my kitchen table reading how a boy died.

The seeds are going into the ground faster than I can count them. I’m not sure anymore which of us is the gardener.

“Oh, shit,” all three of us whisper.

At once. We share a look, Maddie, Viper, and me, sitting on a mat on the third floor of a gym with our legs out in front of us like children, and in the look is the whole of what Valerie’s handed us. A building. A deed. A hard drive. A window.

Yup.

It’s official. Valerie Vixen Reinford is a cunningly savage bitch.

CHAPTER 40

Permanent Vicious Commitment

~MORRIGAN~

“You’re going to get matching tattoos. With me.”