Page 140 of Slashed Bonds

I take another pull. Let the smoke out slow.

That’s a commitment. A tattoo’s permanent. A tattoo with three men is a sentence you can’t take back, and I’ve known the woman a week, and I’ve already said Monarch to a man in the dark and regretted it.

Too much. Probably too much. File it.

Except I know what I’d put on her, if she let me. I’ve known since the lobby.

Not over the scars. She’d never allow it and I’d never ask. Beside them. On the inside of the left wrist, where the pulse is, where the ridges end. A wall. Three courses of stone, in blackwork, the way I draw them in the margins of my structures notebook when a lecture goes long.

Small. Hers to cover with a sleeve if she wanted. Hers to know was there.

I’ve drawn it four times this week. I’ve burned three of them.

Small, fast steps on gravel.

I lift my head in time to brace, and eighty pounds of dog hits me at the chest and takes me backward into the brick.

“Jesus fuck!”

“Isn’t it sinful or some shit to take the Lord’s name in vain?”

Nikolai.

I have to survive the licking first. Knox has his front paws on my shoulders and his tongue in my ear, and he’s panting like he’s run a mile to deliver this specific indignity, and when I finally get his head pushed to one side I can see past him.

Nikolai’s standing on the path. Sweats. Nothing else. Shirtless at two in the morning in October with his hands in his pockets, one of which was holding a leash until he decided not to.

On purpose. Asshole.

“You and I both know I don’t know shit from that book,” I say, “except the respect-your-elders part everybody loves, and everybody forgets the other half, which is don’t provoke your children.”

He smirks.

“Ah. The good old selective reading.”

Knox gets bored of my face and climbs off me, and I sit up with dog hair in my mouth and wet on my neck and my cigarette, against all odds, still lit.

“Why are you walking the dog at this hour?”

“Cassian texted.”

He pulls out his phone and tilts it at me. I frown. My phone’s upstairs, face-down on the nightstand, because I came out here to think and thinking with a phone isn’t thinking.

“Which is why I came to find you,” Nikolai says. “He’ll find both of us. Saves him a trip.”

“How grand.”

I say it to the gravel. Nikolai sits down on the bench arm, above me, with his bare feet on the seat, and I don’t ask him where his shoes are because I know the answer, which is that he didn’t think about shoes, because he was thinking about one thing and shoes aren’t it.

I roll my eyes. Typical Cassian. He knows where all of us are at all times, in a house of twenty-two men, and I’m the one with the file that says monitors obsessively.

Okay. Both things can be true.

“How’s Monarch?”

I ask it to the gravel. I’m trying not to worry about her, which is why I’m out here at two in the morning being one with the earth, or whatever the woman in the oatmeal chair tells people to call it when they go outside to think.

“No fever.” Nikolai comes closer. “She needs sleep. That’s all. Cassian pulled some strings with Roz and got an Omega doctor to come to the house while she was out and run tests. Bloodwork. A panel. Making sure the meds she’s on are even right for her.”