Page 189 of Slashed Bonds

“Malice.”

Another.

“Monarch.” His thumb moves. “Mommy.”

Each one placed. Each one set down in front of me like a stone, like they’re not names but functions, four tools for four jobs, and he’s telling me he knows what each one’s for.

“You’re ours. The Omega of our pack. The first Omega on the Blackridge Vipers.” His mouth moves, a quarter inch. “And certainly not the last.”

He stops.

Not to think. To make sure the next words have nothing around them. No fire, no sirens, no paper in my hand. Only the two of us and the dark and his hands on my face.

“And no one will ever hurt you again.”

Nik looks down at me, and something in him that I’ve only ever seen go cold goes molten instead.

“I fucking vow it.”

ACT THREE:

CHAPTER 26

What It's Like

~MORRIGAN~

“Seasonal depression can go kick your ass another day, bitch! We’re going OUT!”

I’m glaring at her.

From under the comforter. The biggest, heaviest, most expensive comforter that has ever existed, dark green, down-filled, delivered by someone in this house without a word three days ago, and I’ve been under it for all three. There’s a gap at the top the width of my eyes, and through the gap I can see Maddie standing at the foot of the bed in an outfit that could only be described as bubblegum fall. Pink corduroy. A cream knit. Boots with a heel. Her hair in a high pony that swings when she stamps her foot, which she’s doing.

I look at the outfit like it’s a plague.

Withdrawal sucks balls. That’s what this is. Let’s not dress it up.

That, and the weather. It’s been raining for six days, the gray sideways kind that gets into the walls of a carriage house built for horses, and the window over the lounge is a sheet of water, and the light coming through it is the color of dishwater. Nobody’s getting out of bed in this. Nobody with a choice.

Two weeks.

That’s how long it’s been since my shed went up. Two weeks since I stood in a field with a note in my fist and a man’s hands on my face, and the fire department’s report came back last Thursday in a brown envelope Cassian opened at the kitchen table and didn’t show me. Accelerant. Point of origin, the door. He told me that much. He didn’t tell me the rest.

They poured it on the door. Where I’d have been standing if I’d come home. If I hadn’t been under lights with my name on a sheet.

Everything was saved. I keep saying that to myself like a prayer, because it’s the thing that should matter. The three of them saw it coming, cleared the place over two days, and left behind the things that would make it look lived in. A few clothes on the line. A mug on the sill. Knox’s old bowl, the cracked one, by the step. Enough to convince whoever came that the place was worth burning.

It worked. They burned it.

And I’ve been in bed for three days, and I’d like to say it’s the withdrawal, and the withdrawal is most of it, but under the withdrawal there’s a thing I haven’t said out loud.

The audacity.

That’s the word that’s been sitting on my chest. The audacity of them. They ruined me once. They took a boardroom and a career and a scholarship and turned them into a window and a hospital bracelet. They took my family, dispersed them under a name I’m not told, put my father’s house on Alder Row into the ground in ash. They put a drug in my neck that burned out the only thing an Omega’s told she’s for. They nearly killed my dog, and I’ve never let myself say that part either, that the X over Knox’s eye wasn’t an accident, that they meant him dead from the start because he was mine, because he was loud, because he wouldn’t leave my side.

They threw me off a second floor and left me on the ground for whatever came next.

And it wasn’t enough.