Page 7 of Slashed Bonds

Not one of them meets my eyes.

There’s no rage in their faces either. Rage I could work with. Rage is a temperature, and temperatures change.

What’s there is worse…

The mild, faintly inconvenienced expression of men waiting on a delayed flight.

Theo steps around into my sightline last, straightening his cuff.

So I ask him the only question I have.

“What did I do wrong?”

My voice comes out steady.

That’s the last gift my body gives me for five years.

“That’s all I want to know. Tell me what it was and I’ll fix it. Tell me what I did to deserve any of this.”

Theo exhales through his nose. He shakes his head, and there’s something almost like disappointment in it.

That’s the detail I’ll chew on for half a decade.

“Nothing, Mori,” he says. “And that’s the problem.”

I blink.

“We don’t need an Omega who’s going to drag us into the pit with her.” He gestures at me with two fingers. The gauze. The blood on my lip. The whole exhibit. “Look at it. Whatever this is, it’s spreading.”

Look? Arent you the same ones who signed the writing on the wall? I didn’t do this to myself, so why am I the victim?

“We’ve come too far to lose all of it for one person, so something has to give.” His hand flicks between his chest and mine.

Back. Forth. A metronome.

“And it has to be this.”

It takes me a moment.

My mind is a smart cookie.

It refuses that arithmetic three separate times before it agrees to solve it.

Then my palms are flat on the carpet and I’m on my hands and knees like something kept in a stable.

“Wait. No. No, no—you’re not thinking of breaking the bond.”

My voice is climbing. I can hear its rise in pitch and I can’t reach it to pull it down.

“Why? What did I do? Somebody is doing this to me, you know that?! You’ve known me since I was six years old. Why aren’t you defending me? Why aren’t you helping? My mother is missing. Wren and Corbin have been taken. My dad⁠—“

The word snaps in half.

“I don’t know if Knox was in that fire. They’re saying I cheated. They’re taking the ice from me. They’re taking everything, and you’re standing here helping them do it?”

The silence runs long enough that I can hear the ventilation.

Then the door opens.