Page 135 of Slashed Bonds

I’ve been waiting for it. Waiting to be penalized. Punished. Benched. Released.

And nothing’s coming.

He’s sitting on a bathroom floor with his back to the wall and his eyes on me, and nothing is coming, and deep down, in a place I keep locked, that frightens me.

I close my eyes.

Sit with it. It’s been a long time since I had to acknowledge fear. Not the fear of a hand at the back of my neck. The other kind. The fear that this man hasn’t pushed me away. Hasn’t left me in the woods. Hasn’t discarded me like the weight I know I am.

He’s carrying a team. Twenty-two rejected Alphas with a list of problems that reads like a committee’s nightmare, and a game tomorrow in a building where his season died, and a liaison with a clipboard.

Why prioritize my crazy? Why want to help me? Why, in any world I can draw, would this man want to save me?

Something clicks.

Before I can stop it. The thing in me that reads angles, the thing that lives in the same room as hockey, wakes up and asks the only question it ever asks.

What’s the motive?

I open my eyes. I’m staring at him. What’s the ultimatum? What’s the price? Is this a silver lining that leads somewhere, and is the somewhere another boardroom, another vial, another window with a loading bay under it and a man checking his watch?

“Mori.”

He says it quietly.

I stare at him like I don’t understand why he’s saying my name.

“Monarch.”

Monarch. It lands somewhere. A word I’ve heard through a wall, low, in Killian’s register, said to Nikolai in the dark like it was a secret he was annoyed to be sharing. I’d thought it was about someone else. I’d thought it was a code for a play.

I don’t have it. Not what it means, not why it’s mine. It tickles. I let him see that it tickles and nothing more.

We share a look.

He sighs. It’s small. Then he nods, once, like a man who’s cracked a code he’s been working on since the frost.

“Good morning, Malice.”

And now I frown.

Because why the fuck does he notice everything? What is it with him? Who is he? What is he? An Alpha from the deep end of a ward, the third floor of somewhere worse than Bellwether, playing the role of captain on a team of cynical bastards, waiting for the right moment to trap me in a cycle of misery and call it vengeance?

“I don’t trust you.”

“Valid,” he agrees.

No pause. No hurt. A man accepting a weather report.

“Which is why you’re out, yes?”

I don’t reply.

He nods, like the silence was the answer.

“It’s why only Maddie can notice you,” he says. “Because you only come out to protect Mori’s mind from fragility. Yes?”

He knows. He can see her. He can see the version of me that’s sitting in this bath with her grin held behind her teeth, and he’s talking to her like she’s a person.