Page 291 of Slashed Bonds

And I think of the dot. The one I counted strides to. The one where he’d have bent over across from Cassian and breathed through his nose on the first draw and his mouth on the second, with every camera in the conference on his hands. I’d wanted that. I’d pointed a month at it.

This is better. This is the draw. He’s bent over on a carpet and he’s breathing through his mouth and nobody’s dropping a puck.

Fear.

A first. Look at that. Take a picture, Maddie.

She would, if she were here. She isn’t. I asked her not to be, and Viper not to be, and Val not to be, and the three of them agreed in the way women agree when they’ve decided you’ve earned a room to yourself. This one’s mine. The only Omega in it is the one who went out the door, and the only witnesses are two men who came with the deed and three who came with me and a dog who came because he goes where I go.

“But that’s Silas and Dorian’s punishment. The slow one. Months of it. For you…” I take my boots off the desk. Put them on the carpet. “I’m thinking we do something better. Something with a touch more ceremony. Like, I don’t know…”

I snap my fingers.

“Taking out the trash?”

The two men have him before the snap’s finished echoing.

One under each arm. Up off his knees like he weighs nothing, which to them he doesn’t, and he’s cursing, he’s asking what I’m doing, what the fuck am I DOING, kicking at the carpet and trying to make noise, trying to make the kind of noise a man makes when he thinks noise will bring someone, and there’s no one. The building’s mine. The floor below is empty. The lobby fountain’s running for nobody.

They walk him to the glass door.

I follow as far as the threshold. No farther. I stand where a girl stood with her bandaged arms braced on this frame five years ago, and I put my left hand on the frame where hers was, with a monarch on the back of it, and I feel the cold of the metal come up through the ink.

Same frame. Same hand. Different woman holding it.

Open it. The river air comes in, cold, with the smell of water on it. They walk him out onto the long balcony, across the stone, to the rail, the same rail, and they stop there with him between them and turn him to face me.

“We’re on the second fucking floor!”

He screams it. In fear. And then he freezes, all of him, because he’s heard what he’s said.

Yes, Theo. We are. I’ve said that sentence from exactly where you’re standing. Twelve thousand people have heard me say it.

The guards hold him at the rail and wait.

For my command. I know that. I watch them wait, and I rise.

Out of her chair. Around her desk. Across her carpet with the water pattern in it and the glass crunching under my boots where the vase went, toward the open door and the gray light and the man at the rail.

And the doors open behind me.

I hear them. The heavy glass at the top of the stairs. And the footsteps that follow are three sets, and I know every one of them the way I know the stomp, except these I learned on purpose. A captain’s, even, measured, a man who doesn’t hurry because the room arranges itself around where he’s going. A defenseman’s, heavier, with a hitch on the left from a knee that’s been through glass. And a goalie’s, quick and quiet, the walk of a man who spends his life in a crease and doesn’t trust floors.

The men who organized this madness.

Who bought this building with a cream folder on a basement counter. Who leaked the footage to a sheet of ice and twelve thousand people. Who are going to be hosting, for however long it takes, the long slow correction of a pack that thought it could ruin me and put a note under a rock about it.

I don’t look back at them.

I don’t need to. I smirk, and I feel them behind me, three men standing boldly in the open door of an office where a girl was dragged across a carpet five years ago, with their own triumph on their faces, and I watch Theo see them over my shoulder.

I watch him understand.

The whole shape of it. The reverse. The card he’d played on an eighteen-year-old in this room flipped and played back, with the same stone and the same rail and the same river under it.

“M-M-Morrigan.”

His voice has gone to pieces. Like the vase.