Page 50 of Slashed Bonds

That’s the detail I file. She doesn’t go rigid again, doesn’t claw at the forearm, doesn’t drop her weight. She stands inside the hold with her hands resting on his sleeve like she’s leaning on a railing, calm as a Sunday, though I’d bet the truck outside that she has no clue what the fuck is happening.

Killian looks at me.

I keep my hands where they are and look back at Nik. Then at Killian.

A message with no words in it, which is the only kind he trusts.

He nods, a quarter inch, and gets to the point.

“Is that Malice?”

Nik says nothing.

The silence that follows is loud as fuck.

The compressor hums somewhere under the building. The dog’s tags clink against the trophy case. Somebody on the ice behind two walls of glass shouts for a pass.

Then the source of the silence speaks.

“Is this a kidnapping?” Her voice is softer than what she used on me outside. Almost polite. “Cause if so, I need to pee first.”

I don’t know why in events her words ignite the reaction happening in real time.

The audacity of the statement, or the tone, level and reasonable, like a woman asking a receptionist about the parking validation.

But Killian’s hand slaps over his own mouth a half second too late, and a snicker escapes around it, brief, high, and utterly un-Killian, before he crushes it back down.

And I know we’re fucked.

Because Nik’s head turns.

His eyes land on Killian, and I’m already cursing, moving, and the math is simple. Nik is going to go for the thing that laughed, and Killian is going to let him, because Killian would let Nik put a fist through his face before he’d put one through Nik’s.

So I go for Killian first.

I hit him at the hip, mid-lobby, and we go down together in a tangle of skate guards and shin pads at the exact spot where Nik arrives a quarter second later, snarling, into empty air. He crashes past us into the glass of the trophy case hard enough to rattle every plaque inside it.

Please let the dog stay out of this.

The dog does not stay out of this.

Eighty pounds of fur hits Nik from the side like a linebacker with a personal grudge. They go over together. Nik gets an arm up. The dog gets its front paws on his chest protector, plants them, and stands there, mouth open, tongue out, panting into his face like this is the best game anyone has ever invented.

“Oh, fucking shit.”

That’s her.

And she’s moving.

Toward the pile, straight at it, and this is a woman who is maybe a hundred and forty pounds with her boots on, running into a heap of two Alphas and a dog with a feral goaltender at the bottom of it.

Nope.

I get up faster than I got down.

She doesn’t slow. I step into her path, and she tries to go around, and I get an arm under her ribs and the other behind her knees, and she’s up and over my shoulder before either of us has voted on it.

“Wait!”