Page 9 of Slashed Bonds

It tastes like cold ash and pennies and something floral gone wrong.

I choke. I gag.

Some of it comes back up and he keeps his palm clamped over my mouth until I’ve swallowed, then steps back and wipes his hand on his trousers.

Then he says the formula in a boardroom voice.

Unhurried. For the room.

“We, the Hellsing Ross Pack, reject Morrigan Crowe as our Omega.”

The words go into me and echo the way words do in an empty rink.

“Paperwork was finalized three weeks ago,” he adds, tucking the empty vial into his pocket like a receipt. “We were waiting for a moment that would make it credible.”

Three weeks.

Three weeks ago I made him a birthday cake with the wrong food coloring and it came out gray and all four of them ate it anyway, and I laughed until I had to sit down on the kitchen floor.

They faked being happy with me for three weeks? No. This…all of this has to be longer than that. Three weeks is the tip of the iceberg. Has it been months? Years? Was this all a facade and I’m simply late to the party they were planning all this ti⁠—

Then the bond breaks.

There’s no language for this. No true definition of the pure agony that ignites down to the molecular level. To the atoms and cells within my very being, sending electric signals that the beginning has now come to an abrupt end…

The closest I’ve gotten is this.

Something reaches into the back of my neck, takes hold of four cords rooted deep behind my sternum, and pulls them out through the front of me.

One.

After another.

After another.

And every place they were anchored is a place that tears.

I burn.

My throat, my spine, the mark at my nape, all of it goes molten, and I hear myself screaming from somewhere far off, as though the screaming is happening in the next room to a girl I used to know.

Then the fire flips over into cold.

So absolute that I’m convinced somebody has opened a door onto a January field. Frost in the marrow. Ice where the blood should be.

My body starts convulsing in the guards’ hands, and they pin me to the carpet with a knee and a forearm and the boredom of men working overtime.

I’m cut everywhere.

That’s what it feels like. Not four cuts. Thousands. Like every cell has been issued its own small blade and they’ve all been given the same instruction at once.

And underneath the pain, the thought that outlasts it. The one that will still be here in five years, waiting up for me at three in the morning.

Did they never love me?

Was any of it real, or was I a convenience with a good faceoff percentage?

Twelve years. Childhood to now. The night in the arena parking lot when all four of them asked me at the same time, badly, having obviously rehearsed, and I cried and said yes because it meant we’d get to do this forever.