Page 161 of Slashed Bonds

“First off,” I huff from the floor. “I’m not your boy anything.“

Then the rest of his sentence lands.

“Oh, fuck.” I’m sitting up. “I get to take her pretty plump ass.”

Killian side-eyes me. Rolls his eyes. Pulls back.

“Come on, sweaty messes. Let’s find Knox. I got him food too.”

“Wait.” She turns, so quick it pulls at my ribs. “You did?”

Innocent again. That voice. And Killian’s mouth does the thing it does maybe twice a season, a quarter inch at the corner, as he reaches into the bag and pulls out a smaller one. Brown paper. Grease spots.

“The place does dog dishes. Chicken and rice, no salt.” He holds it up. “The fridge for your room comes today, and there’s a section in it where we can put all of Knox’s food so it works.”

“F-Fridge?”

Knox has materialized in the doorway. Nobody heard him come. Eighty pounds of wet pomsky with his nose up and the X over his eye catching the light, locked on the small bag in Killian’s hand like a man watching a sommelier.

She’s staring at the small bag like it’s a trick.

I’ve watched her not eat for nine days. Not refusing, nothing so deliberate. The signal’s gone. Whatever wire runs from a stomach to a brain and says now got cut somewhere between a boardroom and a windowsill, and she’ll go a whole day on a granola bar she claims and doesn’t finish, and then a plate I’ve put in front of her, and then nothing, and Maddie asks her have you eaten every call because somebody has to.

A fridge in her room isn’t a gift. It’s a wire. We’re rebuilding the wire.

“I…I don’t need anything.”

“You need food,” I say, and I sit up the rest of the way and get my hands on her hips, because she’s still on me and I’m not letting her leave. “Also electrolytes, and that other shit. Coach wants us hydrated before these games, the orange kind, and you barely drink water, so that’s changing.”

She huffs.

But she doesn’t look against it. She looks like a woman doing arithmetic on something she can’t make come out even, and then she looks down at my chest and mutters, “S-sorry for the trouble.”

“Not a trouble.”

I say it before the sentence is finished.

“It’s our duty,” Killian says, “to make sure you have everything you need, Malice. Don’t apologize for shit.”

I can see her trying to process that.

Duty. The word’s a wall she’s hit before, from the other side. Men who called her their duty and used the word to mean property.

I can see her turn it over. There’s a flicker in her face when she does, the Switch coming up to inspect a word before it’s allowed in, cold and quick, checking it for a blade. Killian doesn’t flinch under it. He stands there with grease spots on a paper bag and lets her look, and what she finds, I think, is a man who’s using the word the way my mother used it. Something you owe because you chose to.

Four men made her their duty once and she ended up on a windowsill.

Three men are going to make her their duty and she’s going to end up on a podium. That’s the whole difference. That’s the only one that matters.

She nods anyway.

“Thank you.”

It’s small. Two words, to my chest, with her gloves resting on my shoulders. And there’s something in the way she says it, a vulnerability in the grace of it, that makes me pull her into a hug before I’ve decided to.

“Why are you hugging me?”

“Because,” I huff.