Page 8 of Slashed Bonds

Peach candy over funeral lilies, sweet enough to coat the back of the throat, with something chemical and cold under it. Like a cosmetics counter in an empty mall.

Naomi walks past me without looking down. Past me the way you’d pass a spill somebody else has been assigned to handle.

She settles into the chair at the head of the table behind my men. Crosses her ankles. Smooths her skirt.

Then she smiles at me with what I can only describe as pleasure at a job progressing on schedule, and lifts one hand, and snaps her fingers.

Two men come in behind her.

They take my arms.

My arms above the wrist, straight across the dressings, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t a word.

Something tears.

Warm wet spreads under the gauze and runs toward my elbows, and they lift me by the parts of me that are being held together with thread, and my vision whites out at the edges.

Through it, I look at my Alphas.

Rhys’s jaw moves once. Silas closes his eyes for the length of my scream and opens them after. Dorian looks at the carpet.

That’s it. That’s everything I get.

“Hurry it along,” Naomi says, checking a slim gold watch. “We’re expected at a conference at one.”

Theo nods and crosses to the sideboard.

He picks up a small glass vial with a rubber stopper and turns it in the light with a sommelier’s frown. Then he comes and stands in front of me while the guards hold me up on my knees like a marionette with cut strings.

I look up into his face.

We were the closest.

That’s the thing I need someone, someday, to understand. Not the bond. Not the paperwork. Before any of it there was a boy on the end of the dock at his grandmother’s cottage while I said out loud, for the first time, that I was going to play professional hockey.

He didn’t laugh.

He said we’d need a plan.

He was thirteen and he took out a notebook.

Every dream I ever had, he heard it first.

“Theo.” My mouth is full of blood from my lip. “Theo. Look at me. It’s me.”

He pulls the stopper.

“Finally,” he says, and it isn’t to me. It’s the tone of a man setting down a heavy bag at the end of a long walk. “Can slash you out of our lives for good.”

And he smiles.

That smile does more damage than the vial does.

“Drink up, Mori.”

I shake my head and clamp my mouth shut, jaw locked so hard my molars grind, and he takes my chin in one hand.

His fingers find the hinge and press. Pain forks white and electric up into my ear. My jaw opens against my own will, and the contents of the vial go into my throat.