Page 90 of Slashed Bonds

Long. Hard. I’m looking for the tell, because everybody has one, and I’ve spent five years and six months in a ward learning to find them. The flick of the eyes. The breath held a half second too long. The hand that goes to the back of the neck.

Nothing.

And my instincts, which have been wrong exactly once in my life, and that once was catastrophic, tell me he isn’t lying.

Terrifying. Truly.

“Let’s hope I don’t prove that theory wrong, then.”

The smirk comes back.

Slow. Wicked at the edges.

He leans in, and his mouth is at my ear, and his scent arrives ahead of him, juniper and cold and, underneath, the warm musk that means he’s about to be a problem.

“Eat, Malice.”

Then he takes my earlobe between his teeth and tugs, and goosebumps go down my arms and my back arches without a vote.

“Or do I need to feed you?”

Heat floods my face.

All of it.

I can feel it climb from my throat to my hairline, and I look down at the plate with sudden, intense, scholarly interest, as though the fig situation has become the most important thing in the building.

“Go away.”

He laughs.

Low, in his chest, pleased with himself.

I want to glare at him and I don’t, because I’m busy with the pear, and because the feeling in the room is so strange that I can’t spare the attention.

It feels…

Normal.

That’s the word, and it lands wrong, and it lands right.

A plate of food and a man on a bed and a dog somewhere down the hall knocking over furniture. Not a transaction. Not a scene. An evening.

Odd. And satisfying.

And that’s the danger, isn’t it?

Not him.

Not the teeth at my ear or the hand that put a glass of water on a nightstand. The danger is that I could sit on this bed on a Tuesday night, and then a Thursday, and then a month of them, and stop counting.

I’ve done that once. I know how it ends.

There’s a scar under a moth on my throat that knows how it ends.

And I’m reaching for the fig anyway, realizing this arrangement could dare be something I’d yearn to be permanent.

ACT TWO: