Page 244 of Slashed Bonds

CHAPTER 37

Grace Before Meals Part I

~MORRIGAN~

Waking up in the arms of my Captain is a decent way to deal with a hangover.

Even when I feel like utter shit. Even when my mouth tastes like a bar towel and there’s a drummer somewhere behind my left eye who’s been hired by the hour. There are worse ways to come up out of the dark, and I’ve tried most of them, and none of them smelled like this.

I don’t open my eyes yet.

I breathe instead. The way I’ve learned to breathe him, piece by piece, because his scent isn’t one thing, it’s a building with floors. Cedar first. The ground floor, the one everybody gets, the one that came through a broken filter on a loading dock and nearly put me on my knees. Then up a flight to the smoke. Old smoke, cold, a fire that burned a long time ago in a house with gun oil in the office. And at the top, under the roof, the sweet thing. The faint one. The one I have to hold my breath to find and have never asked him about.

Still there. All three. Nobody’s moved the furniture.

Fragments come back while I breathe.

A van. A ceiling with a hook in it. Viper’s gloved thumb on the inside of my elbow and a cold that ran up the vein like a wire. The gravel, through a window, and two shapes under a light. Then Cassian’s neck, and the porch, and the stairs taken two at a time with my face in his collar, and his voice saying my name once, not a question.

His room. I know it by the smell and I know it by the light, which comes in gray from the window over the desk, and I know it by the whiteboard I can see past his shoulder if I tilt my head, which I don’t, because the drummer’s in charge of tilting. It’s there anyway. In my head. Red marker. A rink with a line from a dot to a far dot and my number at the end of it.

He brought me to his room. Not mine. His, with the book on the desk and the play on the wall.

I’m in his hoodie. The gray one, the one from the hill at five in the morning. My dress is over the back of the chair with the heels under it, placed, not dropped, and there’s a glass of water on the nightstand with a coaster under it, because naturally there is, this is Cassian’s nightstand.

Not naturally. Strike that. Nothing about a man putting a coaster under a hungover woman’s water is natural. It’s a decision.

There’s a green bandage on the inside of my left arm with a black spider on it. I touch it with my other hand. Under it the vein’s a touch sore and nothing else, and the drummer behind my eye is, I realize, a quiet drummer. A brushes-on-snare drummer. For five whiskies on a taper and an empty stomach, that’s not a hangover. That’s a courtesy.

Viper. The amber in the syringe. Whatever that was, she should sell it, and she never will, because selling it would mean someone knowing she made it.

My phone’s on the nightstand too. Face down. Which means somebody read the screen before they turned it, and I don’t have to guess who, because there’s a green text bubble I can see the edge of when I reach for the water, from a number saved as a single cello note.

Got it all. Every word. You were magnificent and you were an idiot. Both can be true. Sleep.

Sent at 1:52. Two minutes after a van door closed on gravel.

I open my eyes.

He’s awake.

Looking at me from four inches away with his head on the pillow and his eyes gone to the soft gray they go to when there’s no roster in the room. One hand’s in my hair. Lazy, slow, fingers moving through it from the scalp down and starting over, like he’s been doing it for hours and hasn’t noticed he’s doing it.

He probably has. He probably hasn’t.

And then I understand it isn’t only the two of us.

There’s a weight at the far side of the bed. More than one. I lift my head a half inch, which the drummer objects to, and look past Cassian’s shoulder.

Nikolai. On the other side of him, flat on his back the way he always sleeps, like a man laid out for viewing, one arm across his stomach and his mouth a quarter open. And beside Nikolai, curled into him the way he never curls into anyone in daylight, Killian. Face in Nikolai’s shoulder. Red tips of his hair across Nikolai’s collarbone. Breathing the deep, even breath of a man who’s gone all the way down and isn’t coming up for anything short of a fire alarm.

And their wrists are cuffed together.

Nikolai’s left to Killian’s right, a pair of actual handcuffs, steel, the police kind, lying between them on the sheet with the chain gone slack.

Why. Why are they. Who had handcuffs. Where in this house are handcuffs kept.

Then the other idea arrives, the one with the kink in it, and I feel the smirk start before I can stop it. Sleepy. One-sided. The piercing catching on my teeth.