Page 30 of Slashed Bonds

She said it flat, the way you’d read a weather report, and every muscle in my jaw locked, because I’ve been in enough rooms to recognize a sentence somebody else installed in a person’s mouth.

Somebody said that to her. Repeatedly. Until she started saying it first, to get ahead of it.

I’ve thought about that every session since.

I never told her the truth.

Her scent is divine.

I don’t know how she reads to anybody else. The filtration in this building strips most people down to a rumor, and I’ve spent years around Omegas who present as advertised, all warm sugar and softness engineered to make an Alpha stupid.

Hers isn’t that.

Hers is the cologne you find in a locked cabinet at the back of a shop, the one that costs more than the shop, that you don’t dare put on your skin because your skin would ruin it.

And now that intoxication is soaked into every surface in here, and I’m not smoking another one, because I refuse to bury it under tobacco.

Which is why I haven’t moved in four hours like some kind of lunatic.

This room is ours.

She has no idea.

The first night, before the door had finished closing behind her, I had a letter drafted to the manager asking his price to hold this specific suite indefinitely. Never rented out. Never stripped. Never scrubbed down with the industrial neutralizer they run through every other room in this building.

He named a number designed to make me go away.

I paid it that afternoon.

Two years ago.

Now we have a habit, and habits are how men like me end up in documentaries. I text. She answers. She shows up, and for a few hours the noise in my skull goes quiet, and then she gets dressed with her back half-turned and leaves without looking at the door twice.

Sweet, sinful Malice.

I didn’t choose her, for the record.

She fell on me.

That night I was wearing a blindfold, which is a thing the house allows and a certain kind of client requests, and which I’d picked because I was three days deep into a bad stretch and had decided that removing one sense might quiet the others.

It doesn’t, by the way. It sharpens them. Do not attempt.

So I’m walking the east corridor blind with one hand ghosting the wall, and I hear a woman’s breathing change.

That’s the whole thing. That’s all there was.

Four steps ahead and to the left, the rhythm goes wrong — a hitch, then a stagger in it, then that specific hollow catch a body makes right before it stops holding itself up.

I moved before I decided to.

Got an arm under her ribs and my other hand behind her skull, and her weight came down into me like something falling out of a tree.

I couldn’t see a thing.

People love that detail when I’ve been drunk enough to tell it, and they always take the wrong thing from it. It isn’t romantic. It’s the opposite. I’ve spent my whole life being told my reflexes are the freakish part of me, and that night they caught a stranger in the dark and I’ve never been more grateful for the one thing about myself I didn’t ask for.

She was burning up. Her scent was everywhere, wrecked and rolling off her in waves, and even like that, half-conscious and soaked through, the first thought that arrived in my head was that I’d never smelled anything better in my life.