Page 101 of Slashed Bonds

She’s watching my face while she says it.

I keep my face where it is; neutral as fuck.

“Screenshot it,” I say. “Send it to the captain.”

“Already did.”

She puts the phone face-down again.

“He replied,” she says. “One word.”

“What?”

“Noted.“

Of all the men in this building,why do I feel as though Cassian is the one who’ll do something about this even if it’s nothing. Quietly. With lawyers or some crazed shit you’d least expect?

We’re in the lounge on the ground floor of Viper House.

It’s the one room in the building that’s been decorated by someone with taste, which means it wasn’t the roster.

Leather couches the color of old blood. A fireplace nobody uses. A wall of windows onto the pines, and a coffee table that’s been reinforced with steel brackets underneath, which I noticed the first night and understood the second.

The men aren’t here.

That’s Cash’s doing.

Maddie arrived at nine this morning, and by nine-fifteen the captain of the Blackridge Vipers had cleared the ground floor with a look, two sentences, and the sentences were; anyone who isn’t on the second floor is on the ice, and anyone on the ice who isn’t skating is running.

Because they pissed him off.

Because of her.

It was instructive, this morning.

Nine hours in this house and I’d already worked out the rule about me, which is that no Alpha on this roster so much as looks at me sideways, since looking sideways means finding out, and finding out involves either the captain or a goaltender with a documented history of putting fists through display cases.

Maddie, though.

Maddie is not off limits.

Maddie walked through the front door in a pink coat, pink suitcase and pink hair, smelling like a bakery had a baby with a florist, and eighteen Alphas turned their heads at once like a field of sunflowers.

And Greenie, for the first time since I met him, wasn’t the one holding the phone.

He was the one standing in front of her.

Territorial. In under four minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve seen Niko.

Here’s how it went.

Nine a.m. The front door of Viper House opens without a knock, because Maddie has never knocked on a door in her life, and the hall fills with her before she’s finished stepping through it.

Strawberry milk. Pink sugar. Peony, thick and sweet, and under it vanilla cream, warm as a kitchen. It hits a hallway that smells of twenty-two Alphas and floor wax like somebody’s opened a bakery inside a locker room, and every head on the ground floor turns.

She stops on the mat. Pink coat. Pink suitcase on wheels. Pink through the ends of her hair, which is white-blonde underneath and cut blunt at the jaw. Pink phone case, pink nails, a pink scrunchie on her wrist that I know is for Knox before she’s said a word.

And she looks at the room the way she looks at every room.