Page 231 of Slashed Bonds

“And that’s how I found out how shitty this world is.” He pulls back. “And I made a decision. I wasn’t going to be one of the fuckers who sits on the sidelines and lets other fuckers walk over what I’ve decided to keep safe. Not from the cruelty of this sport we all adore. Not from anything.”

He offers his hand.

I look at it. A big hand, inked across the back, the knuckles scarred from a trophy case and a practice bag and things I haven’t been told. I put mine in it.

He holds it tightly.

“I have a strong suspicion,” he says, quiet, “that you want to be at this frat party for a particular reason.”

He knows. He doesn’t know what. But he knows.

I should tell him. The tin, the ear, the woman in the car. I open my mouth to, and I close it, because telling him means he’ll put me back in the Mercedes and drive, and the two boys by the coolers in the Halbrook jackets will go on pouring orange into cups for girls who don’t know what I know, and some one of those girls will wake up tied to a bed with a cereal bowl’s worth of life ahead of her.

No. I came here to be seen by them. I’m going to be seen.

“And I’m not going to deny I’ve got intentions of my own.”

And I don’t know his. Fair.

“But one thing we make clear.” His hand tightens. “You don’t overdo anything. You don’t drink more than you’d drink in our kitchen, not for the hell of it, not for the thrill. You stay where I can see you. And you don’t disappear without telling me, not for a bathroom, not for a breath of air, nothing.”

He waits.

I think about the tin in my bra. The thing in my ear. The woman in leather parked somewhere in this neighborhood with a laptop open, listening to the bass through a microphone the size of a lentil.

Stay where he can see me. Don’t disappear. And be bait. Those three things don’t fit in the same room. I’ll make them fit.

“Deal?”

“Deal,” I whisper.

He squeezes my hand. I squeeze right back, hard enough that he feels it, and something in his shoulders lets go a quarter inch.

“And avoid the fucking Gatorade.”

I roll my eyes.

But I’m turning, tugging him along by the hand, toward a mansion at the end of a street with its windows throbbing and its lawn full of bodies, and the bass getting into my teeth the way a building full of women did at Ashford.

The house is a wedding cake somebody left in the rain. White columns, three floors, a lawn gone to mud and plastic cups, Greek letters over the door in gold that somebody’s draped with a bedsheet reading a word I won’t repeat. Bodies everywhere. On the steps, on the porch rail, in the windows. Alphas, mostly, the particular chest-out stance of boys with money and a program behind them, and between them the Omegas, in groups of three like we are, perfume thick enough to lean on.

And the scent.

It hits me on the walk. Not one scent. A hundred, in a cloud, Alpha musk, sweat, the cheap sweet smell of whatever’s in the coolers on the lawn, orange, the coolers are orange, and under all of it something chemical and bright that makes the back of my throat close.

That’s it. That’s the smell of the thing in the bottle. I’d know it with my eyes shut. I knew it with my eyes shut, once.

The Switch sits up.

I feel her do it. The cold thing coming up through the back of my skull, the grinning thing, looking at the lawn with my eyes and counting. Exits: the door, the side gate, a window on the ground floor somebody’s propped with a shoe. Phones: all of them. Coolers: four. Boys standing near the coolers who aren’t drinking from them: two, by the steps, in matching jackets with a crest I’ve seen on a plaque in Halbrook.

Hello, boys. Did you miss me.

Killian’s hand hasn’t left mine. I feel it change as we cross the lawn, the grip going from a hand holding a hand to a hand holding a rope, and I look up and his face has gone to the thing it goes to on the blue line when a forward’s coming with his head down. Reading. Every body on the porch, every cup, the two jackets by the coolers.

He’s seen them too. He’s counting the same things I’m counting and he thinks I don’t know.

We’re going to have to have a conversation after this. A long one, in a kitchen, with Nikolai awake, furious, and Cassian with his arms crossed. About who told whom what, and who carried what alone, and whether four people who keep lying to each other for each other’s sake can be called a pack or only a good team.