Page 239 of Slashed Bonds

Orange.

That easy. A cereal bowl’s worth of life. In a cup.

I didn’t touch either of them. I wanted to. The thing that goes through glass wanted to go through both of them and the wall behind, and I stood in the door and let it want, and I did the other thing instead. I held out my hand.

“Phone.”

The taller one gave it to me. He didn’t even argue. He’d looked past me at the two men on the landing and done the arithmetic and come up with a number he didn’t like.

Dox’s third man carried the girl out the back. To a car. To Lessard, as it happens, who was awake and waiting because Dox had called her at nine, and who has her on a drip in a clinic two towns over right now with a chart that’s going to say alcohol and nothing else, because that’s the only way she walks out of this with her name intact.

And the phone’s in my jacket.

I haven’t shown anyone. I read it on the stairs coming down, standing in the dark with the bass under my feet. A group thread. Six numbers, one of them saved as T. And the last message, sent at 11:42, nine minutes before the girl in yellow went up the stairs:

the convicts omega drinks whisky. switch the bottle. leave her where the cameras are.

Switch the bottle.

They’d never have gotten to it. The boy behind the cloth-covered table was Dox’s too, I understand now, a nephew or a cousin, sixteen and watching every pour. But they’d planned it. In writing. With a timestamp, nine minutes before Teller’s sheet got reused for a girl in a yellow dress.

I’ll show Cassian in the morning. I’ll show Viper now, probably, because she’ll have it off me in her sleep otherwise.

And there’s a second thread on it. I scrolled past it on the stairs and went back. Not six numbers. Two. The tall jacket and T, and it goes back eleven weeks, and the fourth message from the top says third pair RD, cast on, won’t be dressing, easy and the fifth says do it at Sig house. make it look like he came for the party.

Teller. In writing. Eleven weeks ago. Before Ashford. Before she’d skated a single shift for us.

They’d picked him because he was the one they could reach. Not a threat. Not untouchable. A kid with a cast who’d be alone at a party because the rest of the roster was on the ice, and whose name would make a hashtag that stuck to ours.

I’ll give that to Cassian too. In the morning. With coffee. Because a man should be sitting down for it.

“Her ex certainly still loves her.”

Dox. Low, from the bench beside me, looking at nothing.

I side-glance him.

His hands come up. Palms out. Surrender, obvious and theatrical.

“I’m allowed to speak the truth.”

“You watched that?”

“I watched a man’s hand stop six inches from a woman’s throat because he saw me behind her.” A shrug. “That’s not a man who hates her. A man who hates her finishes the motion. That’s a man who wants to own a thing he can’t have anymore and doesn’t know what to do with his hands.”

He’s right. I read the same thing from the bar and didn’t want to call it that.

“Plus.” Dox turns his head. “A birdy told me the fucker’s about to lose his inheritance.”

That has all of us.

Valerie, in the front, turned all the way around. Viper, with her thumb on the plunger. Me, with my head off the wall.

“Why the fuck?”

Dox chuckles.

It’s a bad sound. The sound of a man who’s cracked a code he’s been working on for a month and found it’s simpler than he’d feared.