Page 272 of Slashed Bonds

Mid-turn. One foot moved and the other not, the way a man stops on a dot when the linesman’s hand twitches and the puck doesn’t drop. And I feel it through his hand on my back, the whole of him going to the place he goes before glass breaks, and behind me I feel Nikolai and Killian feel it too, and they pause, and I catch the look that goes between them over my head.

Nervous. Those two don’t do nervous. They’ve seen this before and they don’t like where it goes.

I squeeze his arm.

Draws his eyes down to me. He’s gone gray, dark, far away, and I look up at him, and I pout. The pout from the ring. The one Nikolai said he’d be weak for all his life.

“Can we get ice cream on the way home?”

Silence.

It’s the most random question a woman has ever asked in a room this tense and I know it, and whatever Vance was trying to trigger, whatever lever he’d reached for in a man he last saw as a teenager, the question goes through the boiling thing in Cassian like a blade through water. I watch it happen. The gray comes back. The far-away comes home. He focuses on me the way he focuses on a puck, total, the room gone.

“Yes, Mori.” Quiet. “Anything you want.”

And he leans down and presses his mouth to my forehead.

In front of all of them. In a ballroom. And I hear it land on the people around us, a small intake, because Cassian Vane is a man who’s never once in his public life shown affection to anyone, to the point where there’s a running bit on Maddie’s feeds about whether he has a pulse, and here he is with his lips on a woman’s forehead in front of a Vance.

I’m the first. I keep being the first with him. I’m going to stop counting and start keeping.

“For a man who was asking for a collaborative effort,” says a voice behind us, “to then call his prospective ally’s Omega a charity case is rather contradictory collaborative work. If you ask me.”

I frown.

Because the voice is deep, and even, and it’s got the cadence of a man reading a score, and for a second my brain can’t place why it sounds like Cassian when Cassian’s mouth is on my forehead.

I turn.

And the man in question is standing six feet behind us in a suit you could tell was expensive from across a county, charcoal, cut close, with silver at the temples of hair that’s otherwise Cassian’s hair, and Cassian’s jaw, and Cassian’s eyes gone to a gray that’s seen more than his son’s have, and a face that’s an older, harder, more ruthless draft of the one I woke up next to this morning.

Oh. There he is. The gun oil. The hospital wing. The man who did it one at a time with months between.

Naomi’s gawking.

“Y-you’re Mr. Vane.”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t let her finish. He gets to the point, the way his son does, and he looks at Vance while he does it.

“One of our top-priority organizations specializes in helping Omegas in various situations avoid permanent disability. Homelessness. Total abandonment, by Alphas who’ve selfishly decided that a commitment made with a written contract is no longer favorable enough to be loyal to.” Flat. Each word placed like a stone in a wall. “I don’t consider that charity work. But alas. Everyone has a different perspective on things that aren’t important to them. Unless there’s financial gain in it. Or they find themselves in a similar predicament.”

Naomi’s mouth is open.

And I’m standing there with my glass registering what he’s said. Slowly. The way you register a score you’ve misread.

Omegas. Permanent disability. Hospital. Nerve surgery. A shed on Omega land bought by a lawyer for a woman who couldn’t sign her own name yet. Two photographs a year through a post office box.

Wait.

I look up at Cassian. My eyes have gone wide, I can feel them, and he’s looking down at me already, and he reads it off my face the way he reads which version of me is in a room, and he doesn’t say anything.

He nods. Once.

Him. It was him. The benefactor. The man I’ve been thanking in the dark for five years without a face to put the thanks on is standing in a ballroom six feet from me in a charcoal suit having called Naomi Vance’s father a hypocrite to his face.

Before any of us can respond, a voice comes from the side. High, sweet, pitched like a bell.