Page 243 of Slashed Bonds

And I step in and take his chin in my hand, the way I take Mori’s, and I grip it and hold him still and kiss him. Hard. The way he kissed Monarch in a ring with sand on his back.

He melts in five seconds.

Five. I count them. The fury going out of his jaw under my fingers, the hands coming up and finding my jacket and fisting in it, his mouth opening under mine, and we’re standing on the gravel kissing like men who haven’t seen each other in a month instead of six hours, until Cassian groans beside us.

“I’m going to lose my sanity with the two of you around.”

I break it.

Not far. Nikolai’s forehead against mine, his breath hard, his hands still in my jacket.

“Okay,” I mutter. “I was bad. It wasn’t candy. But you’re an obsessed motherfucker and you’d never have let me do what I needed to do tonight.” A beat. “So you can fuck up my asshole later. Deal?”

A long silence.

A drawn-out one, with the van idling behind me and Cassian breathing through his nose and Nikolai’s eyes an inch from mine, dark and then darker. Then he grumbles it. From low in his chest, like the word’s being pulled out with a hook.

“Deal.”

“And this,” Cassian says, “is why I’d never bring either of you to a negotiation.”

He walks past us. Toward the van. Toward the open door and Valerie with an Omega in her arms, and he says over his shoulder, “I’m sleeping with Mori tonight. You two can go do whatever fuckery punishment without me.”

“Sounds like you’re jealous,” I hum.

“More like intolerable,” Nikolai adds.

“Fuck off. Both of you.”

He takes her from Valerie like she weighs nothing. She stirs, says a word into his neck that’s his name, and he carries her up the drive with the green spider on her arm catching the porch light, and he doesn’t look back.

I smirk.

And I feel it, then, all at once. The night landing. The whisky and the stairs and a girl with her eyes rolled white, the van and the needle and the thing Viper said about a clinic three states over. Exhaustion, the real kind, going down through me like water through sand.

I pull away from Nikolai.

“You’re trying to quit?”

I look back. He’s standing on the gravel with his bare feet, looking at me seriously. Not the Switch. Not the goalie. The man.

“Trying.” I shrug one shoulder. “But those nicotine sticks aren’t shit.”

That gets a smirk out of him. He comes over and pats my back, once, the way men do.

Then he reaches for my hand.

I don’t expect it. His fingers find mine and close, and squeeze, and hold, the way he held hers in a ring with a pinky, which he’s never done with me in four years of a shared bed and a bathroom floor.

“I’ll make sure you’re not wandering off to Narnia in your sleep.”

Translation: whatever withdrawal fucker you’re dealing with, however many nights you wake up at three with the room too loud and your hands reaching for something that isn’t there, I’m there. I’ll lead you back.

Four years. He never once said that. He did it. Every night, without a word. And now he’s saying it, on gravel, because of her.

It’s crazy to think about. One Omega. A woman with a dog and a slashed neck walking onto a loading dock five weeks ago, and every one of these things set off from that like dominoes down a hall. Cassian back at the dot. Nikolai holding a hand. Me with a plastic stick in my pocket and a plan with a fourth tier. The three of us standing at a gate at one in the morning feeling like a pack is the strongest it’s ever been.

I guess that’s when you know it’s real…