Page 53 of Slashed Bonds

Hard enough that when she releases it, there’s blood.

A bead of it, then a line, running from the piercing down toward his chin, and he doesn’t wipe it, and he doesn’t move, and he’s looking up at her like she hung the fucking moon.

She smiles down at him.

Sinister. Satisfied.

And she says three words I’ve never once heard sound the way they sound in her mouth.

“Good fucking boy.”

Jesus fucking Christ…why do I want her saying those very words to me?

CHAPTER 6

Mommy's Talking

~MORRIGAN~

Ican see why gods enjoy being worshipped.

There’s a man on his knees in front of me.

Six-foot-something of him, thick through the chest, built like he was poured into the chest protector rather than strapped into it, blood running from his lip down over the silver, and he’s looking up at me like I’m the only source of light in the building.

It does things.

Sinful things.

To an Omega who could, without much persuasion, flip a switch of her own if it meant getting to ride this Alpha faster than the current schedule allows.

And I’m not a woman who gives two fucks about the rules when the rules are stupid.

Which they are. Most of them.

Most of the time.

The only thing keeping me on my feet and out of his lap is the dog.

Knox is sitting beside him. Upright. Ears forward. Being so good it’s obscene, panting like he’s been personally invited to the ceremony, and something about my dog’s polite attendance is enough to hold me at the edge of unhinged instead of over it.

Barely. A girl can dream.

Public affection that borders on arrestable has always been a kink of mine.

I’ve never said that out loud. I’ve never had anywhere to say it. It lived in the same drawer as pole, skateboarding, and every other thing I wanted at seventeen and assumed would stay wanted, because wanting was all I’d get.

Then this man went and knelt in a lobby.

And the other two are still standing there, one bleeding from the mouth, one on his knees on the stone with his headphones knocked crooked, watching me like I’ve done a magic trick.

All these Alphas, making a girl think about possibilities.

I know how I did it.

That’s the part none of them do.

There’s a word the government uses, when it has to. Not in public. In the paperwork, in the intake forms with the small print, in the reports that never get filed where anyone with a reason to read them can find them.