Page 32 of Slashed Bonds

I get up.

Duty calls, and paradise is on a schedule.

Because we got the call.

Or, more accurately, the invite.

Desperation adores summoning the worst of the worst when it needs the best of the best.

The phrasing pleases me enough that I laugh out loud in an empty room, which is a warning sign I plan to ignore, and then I go take a shower.

The water runs hot enough to scald.

Keeping my hands to myself is a challenge, because the last four hours provided a great deal of material, and that woman is flexible in a way that ought to be studied.

Dangerously so.

Which is what started the whole gift problem.

It began as a question. What do you buy for a woman who won’t accept gifts, won’t give you a name, and answers personal questions with a look that could take paint off a wall?

First idea was pilates. Good for her. Low impact. Social.

Then I pictured Malice in a bright studio full of chatty women in matching sets, and dismissed it inside two seconds.

She isn’t a social butterfly. Not anymore.

Not with those arms.

I’ve had my hands on those scars more times than I can count. Four ridges across each forearm, thick and deliberate, all running the same direction at the same angle.

That wasn’t an accident. That wasn’t glass, or a fall, or a bad night with a knife.

Somebody held her down and made a pattern.

Then they covered the rest of her in ink, or she did it herself — I’d bet everything on the second — and now she carries arms that are half muscle and half art and entirely a record of the worst thing that ever happened to her.

I’m not putting her in a room full of people who’d stare.

Not that she’d break.

I don’t think she breaks anymore.

Something about her tells me she’s the bitter kind. Dark and dense and hard on the first bite.

Like molasses.

I love molasses cookies.

The reminder makes me grin under the water like an idiot.

Kickboxing was the answer. One-on-one. Omega-only floor, separate entrance, separate sign-in, no Alphas past the threshold.

I own the place.

She doesn’t know that either. Nobody on that floor would so much as look at her sideways, and if somebody did, I’d close the entire building for a week and hold private sessions for one woman until she got bored of me.

And if I ever get to watch her on a pole⁠—