Page 237 of Slashed Bonds

Viper taught me that. On a bench. I didn’t know I was listening.

I turn around.

And there’s Killian.

At the bar. Leaning on the black cloth with one elbow, a glass of whisky in his hand, sipping it with a delicacy that doesn’t belong on a man his size, with the look on his face. The deadliest one he owns. The one from the blue line when a forward’s coming with his head down and Killian’s already decided which part of the glass he’ll meet.

He’s alone at that bar. There are twenty people within ten feet of it and every one of them has found a reason to be somewhere else, so the bar’s a thing that’s harvesting only him, red light on the red tips of his hair, ink on the hand around the glass.

If anyone needs the dictionary definition of aura farming, ladies and gentlemen. Meet Killian fucking Graves.

He’s looking past me. At Theo. He hasn’t blinked.

There’s something in his other hand. Small, black, a phone that isn’t his, held low against his thigh where the bar hides it from the room. He’s not looking at it. He doesn’t need to. Whatever’s on it, he’s already read.

He found them. Whatever he went up those stairs for, he came down with it, and he came down to the one spot in the room where he could stand between me and the door.

And I’m looking at him, with the room going slow around me and a seed in the ground behind me, and a thing comes up through the whisky and the Switch and the numb that isn’t any of them.

My man, my man, my fucking man.

CHAPTER 36

When You Know It's Real

~KILLIAN~

She’s going down in five.

Four.

Three—

I don’t make it to three. My arm’s already out, across the hallway between the dance floor and the washrooms, and I catch Monarch under the ribs a foot before her face finds the door.

Dead weight. Whisky weight. Not the other kind. I’ve carried the other kind and it’s heavier.

I check anyway. The way I check everything. Pupils, in the half-light from the kitchen, both the same size and both tracking. Breath, whisky and nothing chemical under it. Skin, warm, not clammy. Her mouth moves against my shoulder and says a word that might be Daddy and might be dizzy.

Whisky. Only whisky. Five of them, I counted, and she thought I wasn’t counting.

I scoop.

There’s a skill to it that I’ll take credit for. Getting a grown woman off a hallway floor and into your arms without breaking stride, so that from ten feet away it reads as a man helping his date and not a man taking one. The second’s what I’m watching for. I’ve got her up against my chest with her head in my neck and my eyes are already on the room behind us, on the phones.

Nobody. One girl by the stairs looking at her own screen. Two boys in the kitchen door looking at each other. No lens on us. Keep it that way.

Because this is the picture that ends her. Not a note under a rock. A thirty-second clip of the Viper Omega limp in a man’s arms at a party where a kid died of an overdose, posted at two in the morning with a caption somebody paid for. The hashtag writes itself. I’m not letting that clip exist.

And I’m not going to look like I’m kidnapping her either. That’s the other blade. A big tattooed man with a record carrying an unconscious woman out a side door is a different clip with the same ending.

A door opens behind me.

I’ve got her turned and against me before I’ve seen who it is, my body between her and the hallway, because if it’s the two jackets or anyone who drinks with them this is going to become a different kind of night.

It’s Dox.

Black coat. Hands empty. Face like a man who’s been waiting in a hallway for exactly this and finds it on schedule.