Page 58 of Slashed Bonds

As though the words are arriving in a language he half speaks.

Reasonable. That’s the Switch.

Your mind files the memory of what you did while you were out in a different compartment than the one you live in, and when you come back you have to go looking for it, and it takes a hot minute to absorb what you got up to and how unhinged you were while you did it. I’ve stood in a hallway with my knuckles split open and needed a full minute to remember whose face I’d put them into.

Good times, honestly.

“Nikolai Volkov,” he grumbles.

Still blinking too many fucking times.

Nikolai Volkov.

Two and a half years.

Every rule in that building written to keep exactly this from happening, no names, no faces, nothing crossing the door in either direction, and he hands it to me in a lobby twenty minutes after I walked in.

Like it’s nothing. Like it cost him nothing.

I’ve read that name on a roster on a cracked phone screen at three in the morning. I’ve watched it on the back of a jersey through four replays of the Ashford game. I’ve said it out loud, once, alone, in the truck, to hear how it sounded, and then felt like an idiot for a week.

And the whole time, it was his. The man in the mask. The man who bought my dog toys.

Something in my chest does a thing I’d rather it didn’t. Not the butterflies. Under them. A slow, heavy turning-over, like a stone being moved off something that had gotten used to the dark.

Don’t. Not here. Not in front of the other two.

Then his hands come up and grip my cheeks, hard, squishing my face between his palms like a man checking fruit for bruises.

“Did you want me to kill you?”

“I mean.” I try to shrug and can’t, because he’s got my whole head. “If that’s a kink that tickles you, sure. Hey, Nikolai.”

“Malice!”

A hiss. Anger, or impatience. I’m not sure.

Both, probably.

“You weren’t going to kill me.”

I say it plainly. Not brave.

Only the fact of it.

He glares at me like I’ve said something obscene. Like the fact is an insult. And I hold my ground, chin up inside his hands, and I watch him look for a way to argue with it and not find one.

He shoves me away.

Not hard. Enough to make space. Then he turns and drives his fist into the trophy case.

Glass goes everywhere.

Plaques, banners, three years of conference titles, all of it comes down in a cascade, and the sound it makes on the black stone is…

Wrong.

Hollow. Light. Plastic.