Page 144 of Slashed Bonds

“Or he’s acknowledging your level of crazy,” I mutter.

I look at Cassian.

“What’s the gathering for, Cap?”

And he looks serious.

Not captain-serious. Not the face he wears on the bench when a line’s gone soft. The other one. The one from a bathroom floor freshman year.

Both of us sit up. I feel Nikolai straighten beside me at the same moment I do, the way you feel a change in the ice under your skates before you’ve seen it. I drop the cigarette between my boots and grind it out.

“We need to have a serious talk about Morrigan.”

Her full name. That’s not fucking good.

I know what it is. Or I know the shape of it.

He’s had a photo on his phone for a week that he’s looked at more than he’s looked at the tape. He’s had my 2:13 for a day. And this morning he carried a woman up two flights of stairs after she stopped breathing on a path, and he’s been in his room since nine with the door shut and the glasses on, and nobody’s knocked.

He’s done the arithmetic. He’s going to show us the page. And the page is going to have four names on it that I already know, and a woman with a gold watch, and I’m going to find out tonight whether he’s gotten to the plaque in the lobby on his own.

What he wants is for us to hear it and sit still.

“And once I’m done,” Cassian says, “you both have to promise me we ain’t killing anyone tonight.”

And I have a strong feeling neither of us is committing to that shit.

CHAPTER 19

One Man's Treasure

~NIKOLAI~

Punching the bag isn’t enough.

Not after an hour. Not dripping, breathless, skin shining under the gym lights like I’ve been oiled, with three bags on the floor behind me split open and bleeding sand across the mats.

Three. A personal record. I’d be proud if I could feel anything but this.

It doesn’t matter. I own the place. I could take every bag off every hook in this building and open them one by one with my hands, and the only consequence would be an invoice I’d pay without reading.

That’s the point. That’s the whole point of a gym with my name on the lease.

It’s the only thing between me and tracking those motherfuckers down and skinning them.

Volkov Athletic. Three floors in a converted mill on the river side of town, bought with a trust fund I was told to be careful with and wasn’t. Ground floor’s the public gym. Second floor’s the fight school, bags, rings, a boxing coach I poached from the city who hates me and stays because I pay him to. Third floor’s the Omega wing.

Separate entrance. Separate key. A floor with no Alphas on it, ever, under any circumstances, staffed by two Beta trainers who’ve been told that if a man in a Vipers jacket tries to come up the stairs, they’re to call me and then call the police, in that order.

I built it two years ago. For a woman I didn’t have a name for. I never told her that either.

The card system pings my phone when it’s used. Hers pinged at 6:14 this morning. I was already here, on the second floor, on my second bag, and I looked at the screen and put the phone face-down on the bench and hit the bag harder, because if I’d gone up those stairs in that state I’d have frightened her.

She came. Nine days after I handed her the card. She came on game day, at six in the morning, to a building I own, and she didn’t know I was in it.

Then she did know. I heard it. The third-floor door, which is heavy and on a closer and makes a particular sound when somebody holds it instead of letting it swing, and then nothing for a long time, and then feet on the stairs. Bare feet. She’d taken her trainers off to come down a flight of stairs toward a sound she recognized.

Toward it. Not away. I’ve known this woman for two and a half years, and that’s the first time she’s ever walked toward a noise.