Page 232 of Slashed Bonds

Later.

Two of us. Both lying by omission. Both knowing the other one is. Walking into it anyway, holding hands.

“One more question.”

“What?”

I look back over my shoulder. He’s a step behind me, letting me lead, with the fake cigarette in his pocket and his mother in his face.

“Do you dance?”

The smirk that forms is cunning. It’s the smirk from the ring, the one he gave Nikolai over my shoulder with a paper bag in his hand.

“Let me get a glass of whisky,” he says, “and ask me that question again.”

CHAPTER 35

Tick Tock, Buttercup

~MORRIGAN~

Killian is a good fucking dancer.

I’d like that entered into whatever record is keeping track of the things I’ve learned about this man since a lobby with a trophy case in it. He can dance. Not the way boys dance at parties, the shoulder-bounce and the beer held up like a torch. He dances the way he does everything, with his whole weight committed and his hips doing the work, and he dances low, against me, like the bass is a thing he’s reading the load on.

That, and I’ve had too many drinks.

He’d gotten his glass of whisky. That was the first thing he did inside the door, before the coats, before the room, a straight line through a hundred bodies to a table with a black cloth on it and a boy behind it, and he’d come back with two fingers of something brown and looked at me over it and said, “Ask me again.”

“Do you dance?”

He’d drunk the whisky in one swallow. Set the glass on a windowsill. Taken my hand.

And the answer was yes.

The first hour was his. I mean that. I’ve been in rooms with music since I was fourteen and I’ve never been led, not once, not by Theo, who stood at the edges of every party with his arms crossed and watched me like a man watching a stock, and not by anyone since. Killian led. His hand on the small of my back deciding where my weight went, his hip finding mine a half beat before the bass did, and I followed, and the following was a thing I’d never done and liked more than I’d like to admit.

The two in the Halbrook jackets came inside around the second drink. I saw them through Killian’s shoulder, by the kitchen door, with cups they weren’t drinking from, watching the floor. Watching me. One of them said something to the other and the other laughed.

Look all you like. I’m wearing a man’s scent like a coat.

A boy I didn’t know offered me a cup at the third drink. Orange, with ice, held out with a smile that had money behind it, and Killian’s hand came over mine before I’d lifted it and took the cup out of the boy’s fingers and set it on a speaker without looking at him. The boy opened his mouth. Killian looked at him. The boy closed it.

I drank whisky after that. Mine, poured in front of me, from a bottle I watched the whole way.

Rule one, broken by the fourth. Rule two, I’m holding. Rule three’s intact. Two out of three, Kill. For a woman with a tin in her bra, that’s a passing grade.

Four. Five. The fifth was somebody’s idea. Lessard’s new chemistry hasn’t started yet and the old chemistry’s gone and there’s nothing in my blood to argue with the whisky, and the whisky is winning.

Because when I’m drunk, I dance like a stripper.

That’s Maddie’s phrase, not mine, delivered at Bellwether after a night with a contraband bottle, and I’ve come to respect it as an honest assessment of what my hips do when nobody’s counting. Provocative. Slow. A thing that rolls from the knees up and doesn’t ask permission.

Which is why I’m pressed against him.

Back to his front, in the middle of a floor that used to be somebody’s living room and is now a mass of bodies under a ceiling of red light, sweating through a dress that doesn’t have a back to sweat through. My arms up. His hands on my hips. The two of us moving to a beat that’s been going for an hour without a break, surely out of it, both of us, and I don’t care.

He’s had a few. I’ve counted those too, badly. Whisky, neat, four that I saw, and he’s holding them the way a man his size holds things, which is better than I am. But his eyes have gone heavy and his hands have gone loose and his mouth’s been on my neck for a full minute.