Page 221 of Slashed Bonds

It worries me because I can’t find him. That’s the honest shape of it. I’ve spent five years as a woman who could always be found by the people who wanted to hurt her, and I’ve spent five weeks learning what it’s like to be found by people who don’t, and the one who found me first, on a loading dock with his scent coming through my broken filter, is the one I can’t put my hand on.

So I texted Viper.

This afternoon. Can you find him? With a photo of his truck’s plate, which I’d taken without telling him, which I’m not proud of.

Not because I don’t trust him. I trust him more than I’ve trusted a human being since my father stopped crossing his arms. It’s the other thing. The thing under the grief that I’ll admit to a ceiling and not to a man.

I’m afraid he’s a target.

Because they’re saying overdose. The police, the papers, the hashtag. A boy with something in his blood and a stopped heart, a cautionary tale, a line in a coach’s speech about how it’s on the rise. And every word of that is true, and none of it is the story.

Blindfolded. Naked. Wrists and ankles to a bed frame. Bruised in places that aren’t where you bruise when you fall. Left there, in a room at a party, in a state that nobody who’s ever been in a state like it would call consent.

That’s a red fucking flag, and the people holding the flag are trying to fold it up and put it in a drawer.

I don’t like it.

I don’t like it in a way that sits in my teeth. Because Teller was a kid with ambition. He had dreams, the plain ones, the ones that don’t make you special, a roster spot and a career and a girl in the front row. He wasn’t different from me. He was a body in a jersey who wanted the ice more than he wanted anything, and somebody took him apart in a room and then the people whose job is to ask why decided the drugs in his blood answered the question.

Under the rug. Same rug. Same hands on the corners.

I’d thought it would be different.

That’s the part I’m ashamed of, a touch, in the dark. I’d thought, when the uniform said the word, that there’d be more. More outrage. More justice. Because Teller was an Alpha, and I’d spent five years learning what happens to an Omega who’s drugged and left somewhere, and some stupid part of me believed the lesson had a footnote. That it was about what I was.

It wasn’t. It was about what they could get away with.

Where’s the trending? Where’s the outrage? A hashtag with a pun in it for two days and then the algorithm found something else. Or does drugs-in-his-system outweigh what was done to him while he was in that state, the way it outweighed what was done to me in a boardroom, because a dirty panel makes a person into a verdict?

Yes. That’s the answer. It does. It always has.

It’s bothering Nikolai and Killian. I know that much. I don’t know their pasts well enough to know why it lands where it lands in them, but it’s landed hard, and the way they’ve been orbiting each other, closer, quieter, a hand on a shoulder in a doorway, tells me the landing hit something old.

So I’m wondering whether I need to keep an eye on all three.

Which is why I reached out to Viper.

My phone rings.

I have the ringtone for the guys, three of them, and this isn’t any of those. This is the sound I set for Viper four years ago in a facility when neither of us had a phone and we were planning for when we would, a low two-note thing like a cello being woken up.

I roll off the lounge. Knox rolls over in his bed.

His bed. The giant one, the one Maddie swore he never uses, and for a week he’s used it, because there’s a jersey in it. Blackridge black, number 9, VANE across the shoulders. He stole it off the laundry pile, or I borrowed it, depending on who’s asking, and he’s been sleeping curled around it with his nose in the collar.

He hasn’t shredded it. He shreds everything. He’s keeping it whole because it smells like a man who hasn’t been home.

He misses Cassian too.

I’ve started doing a thing I don’t like, which is checking the group text. The one with the three of them and me that Nikolai made the morning after Westmere and named, with no irony at all, PACK. Killian uses it for logistics. Nikolai uses it for photos of Knox. Cassian hasn’t posted in it since the funeral was scheduled, and I’ve scrolled up to his last message four times today to look at it, like a woman checking a pulse.

Tape’s cut. 10am. Bring the dog. Nine days ago. The last ordinary thing he said.

I pick up.

“Did you find him?”

No hello. Viper doesn’t do hello and she’d be suspicious if I did.