Page 292 of Slashed Bonds

“Baby. W-what about the baby? You wouldn’t… you wouldn’t kill the father of your child. Huh?”

I smile.

And I press my hand flat to my stomach. Over the flatness. Over the lentil.

“The father of my child,” I say, “is standing behind me.”

I let him look. At the three of them. At three left hands with a monarch on each and a crown on each ring finger, which he’s never noticed, because men like Theo don’t look at hands.

“As for the father of the child who’s waiting to meet me again one day…” I tilt my head. “I’m fairly confident that child doesn’t accept you as an adequate father figure. One who deserves salvation.” A beat. “I mean. You didn’t give them a chance. Why should I? What kind of mother would that make me?”

He’s horrified.

I watch it take his face. And the guards, at a look from me, let him go.

Both arms at once. Step back. Leave him standing alone at the rail with his hands out from his sides like a man who’s been dropped and hasn’t landed, and I see it cross his mind, the thing that crosses a cornered man’s mind, that he’s free. That letting go means free. That he can run, out the door, down the brass stairs, past the fountain, into a car, to an airport, to a country with no treaty.

Then the footsteps.

Quick ones. Nails on the hardwood of the corridor, then the carpet, four feet moving at a speed no eighty-pound animal should be capable of indoors, and Theo’s eyes go wide a half second before the growl.

It comes through the office like weather. Low, from the chest, the sound of something that’s decided.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”

I kneel. Enough to put my hand on the head that’s arrived at my hip, between the ears, over the X that somebody put there with a blade because he was mine and loud, and I stroke it, and I don’t take my eyes off the man at the rail.

“This man’s a bad, bad boy.” Soft. “Don’t you agree, Knox?”

“AH-WOOOO!”

A howl. A full one, head back, a challenge thrown across a balcony, and I’d bet the deed to this building that one of the three men behind me taught him that in a kitchen at two in the morning with treats, and I can’t even be angry. I can’t complain. It’s the best sound I’ve heard in this room.

I grin. I rise.

I want to be standing for this. Standing with my spine straight and my chin level and my hand on my stomach, the way I’d stand on a blue line under lights, because this is a thing I’d like to watch with pride and pride’s done from your feet.

“I suppose this should be a lesson,” I tell him, “to never play with your food, Theo.”

He’s backed against the rail. There’s nowhere behind him but stone and air.

“If you’re going to slash bonds and burn bridges, you make sure you do it absolutely.” I show him my teeth. All of them, the piercing catching the gray light. “Or else you never know when karma’s going to come bearing gifts.”

“WOOF!”

Knox doesn’t need a command.

He goes. Across the carpet, through the door, over the stone, a gray-and-white shape with his ears flat and his mouth open and eighty pounds of a decision behind him, and Theo’s scream is the scream of a man who’s realized what’s coming a half second too late to be anywhere else.

He goes back.

Against the rail, then up it, lifting himself, one hand on the stone and one knee scrabbling, to get above the teeth, to get his feet off the ground where the dog is, and he gets them off the ground, and he’s leaning, and he’s leaning too far, and he knows it.

His eyes find mine.

One more time. Over the dog, over the stone, across the carpet with the water in it, desperate, the eyes of a man who’s done the arithmetic on a second floor and found the answer he gave somebody else.

If he lives, paralyzed or not, he’s going to wish he hadn’t. What’s waiting for a man who lives through this fall I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy, and he is my worst enemy, and I’ve arranged it anyway.