Page 49 of Slashed Bonds

He’s grinning like a smitten drunk.

Then his arm comes around her neck.

Not a chokehold. Something odder and more intimate than that, a forearm across her collarbone, her back drawn tight to his chest, his chin dropped to the top of her head. He looks over her hair at me.

And his eyes have changed.

There’s the switch.

I put both hands up. Slowly. Palms out.

The way you’d do it for a dog you don’t know, or a cop you do.

“Now why the fuck did Niko’s scent go and chan…”

Killian.

Thank whatever god handles hockey.

He’s come around the corner from the tunnel, still in his skates with the guards on, still in his practice jersey, hair wet, and he stops mid-stride like he’s hit glass. His eyes go to Niko. To the arm across the Omega’s throat. To her face, where they stay a fraction of a second longer than they need to.

Then to me, and my hands.

He knows exactly what not to do.

Both his arms come up.

Then, low and tuneless, he starts to whistle, four notes in a minor key that he’s used exactly three times in the years I’ve known him, and every time was one of these.

His voice drops when he speaks. Lower than he talks. Lower than he talks to me, and he doesn’t talk to anyone the way he talks to me.

“Easy, Nik.”

This is why we needed to be a unit.

Not for the ice. The ice is easy. The ice has rules and a clock.

It’s off the ice where one of us alone is a guided tour of misery, or a headline, or dead, and I’ve never concluded which of those is the better option.

People think Killian is the muscle. They see the size, the tattoos crawling out of his collar, the blindfold he wears around his neck like a dare, and they think enforcer, and they think fists.

Wrong.

Killian’s game is where he stands. He’s a structural thinker. He sees a rink the way he sees a building, load paths and stress points, and he puts himself at the exact spot where the whole play will have to bend around him. He never lunges, because a man who’s already standing in the right place doesn’t need to.

That’s what he’s doing now, with his hands up and that minor-key tune leaking out of him. He’s put himself where Nik will have to go through him to reach anything, and he’s made himself the least threatening object in the room, and both of those things are true at once.

Niko is the chaos. I’m the read. Killian is the wall.

Remove any one of us and the other two get buried.

Nikolai, or in this state, Nik, says nothing.

Nik doesn’t talk. That’s how you know. Niko can’t shut up for ten consecutive seconds. When the switch flips, the words go first. What’s left is a body that runs on scent and proximity, one that will put a man through a wall for standing too close to the thing it’s decided is its own.

He tightens the arm across her collarbone.

And she doesn’t struggle.