Page 259 of Slashed Bonds

I stare at the three of them.

I’m standing in the middle of a basement with my left hand raised like a girl in a classroom, and the basement smells of green soap, of ozone, of the sweet burn of a machine that’s been running in the next room, and the three men who’ve ruined my life in the best way are not looking at me like I’ve said anything strange.

“It’s going to be on my hand, though.” I turn the hand over. Back, palm, back. “Aren’t you bothered by that? It’s not a place you hide.”

Nikolai shrugs.

From the leather couch along the wall, with his ankles crossed and Knox’s head on his knee, in a hoodie with a hole in the cuff that I’d put money on being deliberate now that I know what I know about his bank accounts.

Killian doesn’t look up. He’s in the armchair with that stupid plastic stick between two fingers, pulling on it, letting out a puff of air that smells like candy and nothing else, turning it over to look at the small light like he’s reading a gauge.

And Cassian is at the counter filling out the final paperwork.

Consent. Blood panel release. The three pages Vicious Ink makes everyone sign before a needle gets near them, in a font so small you’d need Cassian’s glasses, which he’s wearing, pushed up his nose with one knuckle while he writes.

“Won’t be a problem,” he says, without looking up from the form, in the voice he uses for line changes, “when we’re staring at our wedding rings.”

There’s a second folder under the first one. Thicker. Cream, not white, with a law firm’s name embossed on the corner that I’ve seen before on envelopes that come twice a year to a post office box. He hasn’t opened it. He put it on the counter when we came in and set the Vicious Ink forms on top of it like a man covering a hand of cards, and he hasn’t looked at it once, and I haven’t asked.

Two-story building. Glass and pale stone. A listing with no photos. He said “anything you desire” into a phone six weeks ago and I thought he meant lingerie.

What.

I’m gawking.

I know I’m gawking because I can feel my mouth and I can’t close it, and the basement’s gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when somebody’s dropped something made of glass and everyone’s waiting for it to finish landing.

“I GOT THAT SHIT ON TAPE.”

Maddie.

Phone up, both hands, pink nails around a case with a pink spider on it that Viper gave her as a joke and she wears as a flag. She’s bouncing. She’s bouncing so hard the tape’s going to be useless.

“GREENIE. Did you HEAR that romantic shit?”

“I’m more concerned,” Greenie says from the doorway, where he’s leaning with his arms crossed and his green hair under a black beanie, “that your actual green friend is going to blackmail them with it now.”

He tips his chin at the woman on the stool by the stencil printer.

“And why are we here?”

“Moral support,” Viper declares.

She doesn’t look up from the magazine she’s found somewhere. Leather, as ever. Green contacts in again, which I’m learning is a mood indicator, the way Killian’s blindfold used to be. She turns a page.

“And I will absolutely use it as blackmail.” Another page. “But I’m not a green friend. You make me sound like Elphaba.”

“He’s only mad you wear green better than he does!”

Maddie, squealing, clapping, the phone forgotten for a second and then remembered and swung back up.

Everyone’s here. Every single person I’ve collected in eight weeks is standing in a basement under a laundromat watching me get my hand tattooed. Six weeks ago I couldn’t have filled a booth.

We’d come down twenty minutes ago.

The laundromat’s real. That’s the thing nobody tells you. A working laundromat on a corner two streets off the river, with a row of machines going and a woman folding towels who didn’t look up, and a door at the back marked STAFF that Dox opened from the other side before Cassian had finished knocking. Stairs, steep, with a rail. And then this.

Not a basement. A gallery that happens to be underground. Three stations along one wall with lamps on arms. A couch, two chairs, a counter with a register that’s a prop. And the walls, every inch, covered in drawings under glass, hundreds of them, in three hands I’ve learned to tell apart in eight weeks of looking at the men who wear them. Dox’s work is heavy and geometric. The third artist’s, whoever he is, is all hairline and shadow. And Valerie’s.