Page 83 of Slashed Bonds

I laugh.

Loud. Full-throated. The sinister one, the one that makes Greenie’s brothers take a half step back, because that is the funniest thing I’ve heard since the sponsor hit the concrete.

Cash sighs. Pinches the bridge of his nose. The universal gesture of a man who’s going to have to sign something about this in the morning.

And Mori shrugs.

A small, deliberate lift of one shoulder inside the circle of my arm, and she tips her head back until it rests against my chest and she’s looking up at me, upside down, split lip and all.

“That rule’s going to be broken tonight.”

CHAPTER 10

What's Mine Is Taken Care Of

~MORRIGAN~

“Food before sex seems like blackmail.”

I’m talking to myself. Mostly.

To the plate, a bit.

It’s a generous plate.

Somebody in this house owns a charcuterie board and knows how to use it, and it’s sitting on the duvet in front of me with three kinds of cheese, two kinds of cured meat, olives, crackers, sliced pear, and a small dish of something dark and glossy that might be fig.

A fig situation. In Viper House. Among the villains.

Viper House sits behind the athletics complex like a secret the university forgot to keep. Stone, three floors, oak everywhere, the kind of building that was a carriage house before it was a dorm and hasn’t decided which it prefers.

Twenty-two men live in it. It smells of twenty-two men, and under that, floor wax and old wood and somebody’s attempt at dinner.

The rules are on the fridge.

I read them on the way through. Nine items. Eight of them are crossed out.

The ninth says 2ND FLOOR IS THEIRS in black marker, underlined twice, and nobody’s touched it.

They walked me up. All three.

Cash ahead, Killian behind, Nikolai at my elbow with his hand not quite on my back, and I noticed the formation and said nothing, because I’ve had five years of noticing formations and this is the first one that was built around me instead of against me.

The room at the end of the hall is empty. Clean. A window facing the trees, a floor that’s been swept this week, a closet with nothing in it but hangers.

Cash opened the door and stood in it for a second longer than the door needed.

He’s been keeping it. I don’t know for what. I didn’t ask.

I’m sitting cross-legged in the middle of Nikolai Volkov’s bed, because my room isn’t ready.

It won’t be ready tomorrow either. Or the day after. Roz said the room at the end of the hall was mine and three Alphas immediately started having opinions about the furniture, and the opinions turned into a list, and the list turned into a plan, and now there’s a bed frame on order and a discussion about window locks I wasn’t consulted on and a dog bed being sourced that’s apparently going to be the size of a kiddie pool.

On my behalf, they said.

It’s on their behalf. Nobody sources an eighty-pound dog bed for a woman they’ve known for nine hours. They do it for themselves, because they want the dog to stay.

I’ll pretend otherwise.