Page 257 of Slashed Bonds

“Because you’re going to buy it.”

Silence.

Three women looking at a fourth. I arch the eyebrow higher, because it’s the only part of me that’s working.

“With what money?”

“Your man’s a multimillionaire,” Valerie says, “and you’re asking me with what money?”

Viper and Maddie turn their heads to look at me. Slowly. In sync. Like two people watching a car go off a bridge.

And I’m confused. I’d like that understood. I’m sitting on a mat with my legs out doing arithmetic on the word multimillionaire and trying to work out which of the three men I woke up with this morning she’s attached it to.

“Multi-million?” I tilt my head.

Valerie stares at me.

The stare of a woman who’s realized the person in front of her has lost her forsaken mind and is deciding whether it’s contagious.

“You don’t realize,” she says, “that you’re basically mated to the heir of the Vane Dynasty? Multi-million-dollar empire. One of the biggest private sports investors on the planet, before you even get to the real estate and the car dealerships. His father owns a wing of the hospital you were in, Mori. He owns the company that made the bed.”

Absolute silence.

The kind with weight. The kind you could set a glass on.

Vane Dynasty. He said mafia and I laughed. He said tax bracket and I giggled. He’s been sitting on a grave with a brush taking the lichen off a stone his father could’ve had replaced in platinum.

“So…” Maddie, drawling, breaking it. “What about the other two?”

“Graves’s father,” Valerie says, counting on a finger, “is one of the primary investors in the biggest pharmaceutical group in the country. Took it over from his wife’s side after she passed. The Korean side.” A second finger. “And Volkov’s Russian. He probably owns at least five companies. And probably pretends he’s homeless.”

I snicker.

I can’t help it. Because that’s exactly him. A man who’d build a floor of a gym for a woman with no name and then go cook pasta in joggers with a hole in the knee and act like the pot was a gift.

But I’m speechless. Under the snicker. Because I had no idea. None. Eight weeks in a house with three men and I couldn’t have told you what any of their fathers did for a living, and I’ve had two of them inside me at once and one of them in my mouth and I’ve slept in all three of their beds.

“You’ve been fucking around and finding out with these men,” Viper says, “and didn’t know that?”

Judgmental. A stare like a clipboard.

“Listen.” I drawl it. Buying time. “I speak the language of cock. Not the language of tell me your life story and what you do for a living.“

“The blind leading the blind,” Maddie concludes, to the ceiling. “Girl would marry them up and pop babies and wouldn’t even know what they do.”

“Hey,” I whine.

And under the whine, a thing I’m not going to say to three women on a mat.

Marriage. Mating. The words don’t fit a woman with scar where the receptor was. A pack bond runs through a place they burned out of me with a vial, and whatever this is, whatever’s been happening in a bed with four people in it, it’s happening without the thing that’s supposed to make it real.

Dox said an ink gun. Killian told me what Dox said, in the car, before the party, like he was handing me a card he wasn’t sure he was allowed to hold. I haven’t let myself pick it up yet. I’ve put it where I put the twice-a-year photographs.

Then, because the word’s in the room now and it needs addressing before it rots:

“And I’m not popping shit. Marriage…” I stop. “Maybe.”

“MAYBE?”