Page 6 of Slashed Bonds

I’m proud of that, later, in the years when there’s nothing else to be proud of. I go for the thumb. I drive my heel down toward the instep. I twist and rake and scream loud enough that the television stutters in its bracket.

Then I breathe in.

And I stop.

Because I know that scent.

Birch smoke. Burnt sugar. Gun oil, faint, from a hobby he picked up at fifteen and never explained. Underneath it, unmistakable, the warm hay-and-cotton note that used to fill my bedroom when he fell asleep in my desk chair watching tape and I’d throw a blanket over him.

Theo.

Every muscle in me quits at once. It isn’t a decision. It’s biology, and I hate it the way you can only hate your own body.

Eleven days of shuttered bond crack open a fraction and flood me with recognition.

My Alpha. My lead. Mine.

For one heartbeat my whole ruined chest lights up with relief.

He came.

He came, he came, he’s here⁠—

Then he starts dragging me down the corridor by the throat and the collar of my jacket. The light strips slide past overhead like lane markers. My heels skid.

And I understand.

He isn’t rescuing me.

I’m garbage being taken out.

He hauls me through the double doors into the executive boardroom on the second floor.

Trophy case. Long table. The window that looks down on the service lot behind the ice plant.

Then he lets go.

I hit the carpet on my hip. My head clips the table leg on the way down, and the room detaches, chimes, and slots back into place half a beat later.

While it’s still chiming, a fist closes in my hair and pulls, and I’m hauled up onto my knees with my throat bared.

I look up.

There they are.

Rhys Hellsing first, arms folded, wearing a shirt I bought him. Rhys, who used to take my hands after outdoor practice and hold them flat against his stomach under his sweater, because I refused to wear anything but the thin gloves and he ran hot.

Cardamom and green apple. He never once complained about my hands.

Silas Brandt beside him. Our goalie. Our silence. The one who left orange slices in my stall before every game for three seasons and never mentioned it, not once, not even the year I asked him outright.

Sea salt and wet slate and bitter orange. He’s looking at the wall behind me.

Dorian Ashe, closest, hands in his pockets. Dorian taught me to take a hit at eleven years old on a frozen pond, over and over, until I could get up before my shoulder stopped screaming.

Hot asphalt, black pepper, honey. He talks constantly. He’s saying nothing.

I look at each of them and recite their names in my head like a rosary, and I hang the thing I love most about them off every name, because some animal part of my brain believes that if I can hold all four at once, this will have to become a different room.