Page 290 of Slashed Bonds

“I’ve always been chosen. Always. Wanted. Picked first, for the top, for the best, since I was a kid on a pond. It can’t end with me behind bars. It CAN’T.” A breath that shakes. “I need a voice of reason. And I need money.”

Then the knees.

I hear them go. Both at once, onto the carpet in front of the desk, the sound a man makes when he’s run out of standing. And the voice that comes up from down there is a voice I’ve never once heard out of him, not in five years, not in a boardroom, not on a dance floor.

Begging.

“Naomi. Please.”

Oh, Theo.

“I know your empire’s got money. Somewhere. There’s always money somewhere. We’re married now, baby. I need you to handle this for me. A small white lie goes a long way, you know that, you taught me that. I can pay you back. I’ll figure it out, I’ll take loans from whatever allies I’ve got left⁠—“

Allies. He’s got none. Viper read me the list on Thursday and the list was a blank page.

She’d read me the rest too, on the beanbag, with her boots on my comforter. The Vance group in receivership. The Ross holdings frozen pending four separate investigations. Hellsing’s father in a hospital with a thing in his chest that happened the morning the paper came. Ashe’s family gone quiet in a way that families go quiet when a lawyer’s told them to. And the frat house, the one with the orange coolers, boarded, with a notice on the door and a girl in a yellow dress’s name on a civil filing that Dox’s lawyers wrote in a font nobody could miss.

One week. A man who said “we play to ruin” to my face in a hockey store and laughed. He laughed because he thought ruin was a thing that happened on a sheet of ice.

“—if I leave tonight. Switzerland. A flight tonight and they can’t touch me, neutral sanctions, there’s no treaty, I checked, I CHECKED. I need a private jet and some cash so I’m not stranded when I land. I’ve got connections. I can get back on my feet in a year and I’ll repay you double. No. Triple.”

He laughs. Nervously. The sound a man makes when he’s trying to convince himself.

“I’ll fuck you so well tonight before I go that you’ll have no choice. You’ll be pregnant by the time I land. Our heir, baby. And then you’ll be above that cunt, finally, the way it was always supposed to be. That’s always been the goal. Right?”

He laughs again. Proud. A man who thinks his plan is coming together.

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know about the clinic three states over and the records a clinic keeps. He’s on his knees offering a woman an heir she can’t carry, to pay for a jet she can’t buy, to run from a warrant that was filed an hour ago. He’s the last person in this county who doesn’t know.

“Your bail was pricey, I’m sure. For you to be out and waiting for the court date. But if you’re pregnant they’ll go easy on an Omega, they always do, it’s a good trade. A wonderful trade.” A pause. “Talk to me, baby.”

The silence is loud.

I let it be loud. I let it fill the whole corner office from the balcony glass to the brass rail, with a man on his knees in it and two men standing in it and a woman in a chair with her back to all three.

Then I say it.

“Naomi, sadly, can’t come to the phone right now.”

I hum it. And I turn the chair.

Slowly. The way a goalie turns to look at a puck in his net. All the way around until I’m facing him, and I lift my legs, both of them, boots and all, and cross them on the desk. On her desk. With my hands folded over my stomach, which is flat, which is six weeks along, which is nobody’s business but the seven people who were in a clinic room.

He’s looking at me.

On his knees on gray carpet with the vase in pieces behind him, in a shirt that was expensive on Monday and smells like a fire on Thursday, with his hair in his eyes and his mouth open. And I watch the realization arrive on his face. I watch it the way I watched Halvard understand a wall. One piece at a time, and his color going with each piece, paler and paler, until he’s the color of the carpet.

“Bail being a million dollars,” I go on, pleasantly, “is a tad steep for your bankrupt wife to afford. And with her husbands’ empires all falling apart simultaneously, which was a lovely touch, the timing, somebody should get an award, she couldn’t possibly depart the jail where the three of you will be joining her.”

I grin.

“But who’d have thought. Having rich husbands means they don’t only have money. They have connections.” I tilt my head. “One of theirs used to be a hockey enforcer, I’m told. Before he found a different line of work. And he was able to get your boys, Dorian and Silas, transferred this afternoon. To a special facility. Isolated. The kind that allows for various levels of… let’s call it correction.”

His throat moves.

“And the best part?” I let it land. “I can go and watch.”

He swallows the lump. I see it go down. And what’s in his eyes now, looking up at me from the floor, is a thing I’ve never seen in them in five years of reading his face for weather.