Page 212 of Slashed Bonds

And I’d told them. All of it. The gloves and the whisper and the drawer and the changing room. Viper played the recording on the counter with the volume up, and nobody spoke while it ran, and when it ended Killian picked up the recorder and turned it over in his hands like it was a bolt he was checking the grade of.

Cassian said, “We’ll handle it.”

That’s all. Three words. He said them to the recorder, not to me, and then he looked at me, and his eyes had gone to the place they go on a dot.

And I believed him.

That’s the thing I keep turning over while a woman tells a story about pie. I believed him. There wasn’t a nag in it. Not the itch at the back of my neck that’s lived there for five years whenever a man says leave it to me, not the thing in my gut that used to count exits when Theo said we’ve got you. It wasn’t there. I looked for it and the room was empty.

Mistrust. That’s the word for the thing that was missing, and I didn’t miss it.

Because they’ve handled it. All of it. Everything I needed before I knew I needed it. A fridge, a lounge, a dog bed, a doctor, a floor of a gym, a storage unit full of my life pulled out of a building the night before it burned. They’ve been handling it for two and a half weeks without asking me, and now there’s a thing that needs handling and I’ve handed it over and it feels…

Natural.

I’ll dare to say it. To the fire. It feels natural.

And under the natural there’s something else, something with teeth, that’s been purring since the changing room.

The grass wasn’t greener.

Five years. Five years I spent in a shed assuming Naomi Vance was cruising. That she’d gotten the men and the money and the life and was floating through it on a cloud of white-flower perfume, while I was learning to sleep with a chair under the handle. And she isn’t. The empire’s bleeding. The father’s hiding it. The pack she bought is a pack of lowlives who won’t pay her back in anything but cash, and she’s marrying them out of arithmetic, and she’s shopping for her own equipment because her assistant’s sick.

Satisfying. That’s the honest word.

And not enough. I’d want more. Much more. In due time.

“Dinner’s ready.”

Killian. From the arch. Flat, an announcement, the way he announces everything.

And Nikolai comes out of the kitchen.

Beelining. Straight at me across the lounge in nothing but the gray joggers, barefoot, with a wooden spoon in one hand and his other hand cupped under it to catch the drip, and every head in the room turns to watch him do it. The shoulders. The ink down his ribs over the scar he keeps turned away from everyone and doesn’t turn away from me anymore. The two-toned hair pushed back off his face with a wet hand.

That’s distracting. That’s deeply distracting. He knows it’s distracting and he’s on a mission regardless.

He stops in front of me. Crouches, so we’re eye to eye, and holds the spoon up between us.

“Blow on it first,” he says. “Then try.”

I arch an eyebrow.

And my intrusive thoughts, which have been sitting quietly for the length of one pie story, win.

“Or I could blow something else.”

Silence.

One full second of it. Then⁠—

“Well. Fuck.” Killian, from the arch. “Everyone go home.”

The room goes.

Maddie’s losing it, both hands over her face, giggling in a pitch that makes Knox lift his head. Valerie’s hollering, a big laugh, head back. The twins are on each other. Dubois has given up on his cushion. And Greenie, from the floor, flat on his back, says to the ceiling, “Y’all are loud fucking ENOUGH in this damn house!”

Cassian’s come out of the kitchen.