Page 41 of Slashed Bonds

I’m eight feet from the doors when they explode outward.

I sidestep on instinct, because five years of watching exits will do that, and a man comes through the opening at speed, and not under his own power.

He’s airborne for half a second.

Then he hits the concrete on his shoulder and slides about a foot, and his briefcase skids past him and spills a fan of paper across the walkway, and he lies there in a wool coat that probably cost more than my truck, blinking up at the floodlights.

Well. That’s one way to open a door.

A second man fills the frame.

Tall. Wide through the chest, narrow at the hip, built the way centers get built when they take every faceoff for a decade and never learn to lose one. His arm is still extended from the throw, fingers spread, and he brings it back down slowly like he’s deciding whether the job’s finished.

His head turns toward me.

Our eyes lock.

And his scent hits me like a slap.

That’s…odd.

Scents don’t normally reach me. The filtration in my body’s been broken for five years. I read Alphas the way a bad radio reads a station, in fragments and static, and I’ve come to like it that way. It keeps me level. It keeps rooms manageable.

Aside from my masked admirer, who fucks me right and blessed me with kickboxing, pole, and five hundred dollars that are going to carry me a long way in the realm of groceries, no Alpha has gotten through in half a decade.

This one gets through.

Bergamot first. Bright, cold, bitter at the edges. Then black leather. Then coffee left on the burner until it’s more smoke than drink, and under all of it a slow roll of charred cedar so dense it feels like standing next to a fire that hasn’t decided whether to be dangerous yet.

Ordered. Every layer stacked exactly where a person would put it if they’d thought about it first.

A scent that reads like a plan.

He takes me in. As I take him in.

Long hair, black, thick, falling past his shoulders in the kind of disorder that takes effort. Ink climbing out of his collar and down both hands. A serpent along the tendons of the right one, script across the knuckles of the left. Silver in both ears, silver through one brow, a ring through his lip that catches the light when his mouth moves. Headphones hang around his neck like they live there.

And a scar.

Left side of his throat. Pale, raised, running from below his jaw toward the collarbone and vanishing under ink, half hidden and not hidden at all.

I look at the scar before I look at the piercings, and I know I’ve done it, and I know he’s seen me do it.

Because his eyes are on my neck too.

On the moth. On what’s under it.

Whatever violence was still running in his face from the throw goes quiet by a degree. His lips part like he was about to say something and forgot to release it. He looks at me from my boots to my hairline in one pass, without hurrying, and it’s a look with an opinion in it.

Would it be insane to assume he likes what he sees?

And that he’d rather die than say so?

He blinks. The door in his face closes. He turns back to the man on the ground.

“We ain’t a charity.”

His voice is low. Unhurried. The register of a man who’s never once had to raise it to be heard.