Page 111 of Slashed Bonds

He closes his eye.

Like he’s too tired to give a damn. Like this conversation is a chore he’s decided to sleep through.

And I know he’s not lying.

The word sits in the room for a second. Mommy. He uses it the way she uses Daddy, as a lever, and it moves things in me I’d rather stayed where they were.

Because I’ve heard her say it. Through a wall, Thursday night, low, amused, in charge, and I lay in the dark and listened to the goaltender I’ve shared a bed with for three years being told to pay attention, and what I felt wasn’t what I’d have predicted.

Not jealousy. Not then. Something closer to wanting to be in the room.

Nikolai’s calm in two conditions. Drugged on something, or fucked well. I’ve known him four years and I’ve catalogued every quiet hour he’s ever had, and every one of them came from one of those two sources.

He hasn’t had time for anything I’d call sex. Not with the schedule Roz has us on. But Mori’s clearly good with that mouth, because he’s satisfied enough to fall asleep in my presence with his arms crossed like a man on a beach.

And that ticks me the fuck off.

I don’t know why I’m across the room.

I don’t know why I’m standing over him, or why my hand’s gone to the front of his throat, fingers spread across the pale patch of skin that runs down from his jaw, gripping, not hard, not soft. I didn’t decide to do any of it. I was in the door and then I was here, and the two inches of space between the two facts are missing from my memory.

He doesn’t flinch.

He opens his eyes. Both. Lazy, fighting sleep, regarding me upside down with the whole of his attention now, and…

Why does he have to look so fucking hot, too?

“I kinda like making you jealous.”

Low. A growl under the words, so low it goes through my hand into my wrist and lands in my cock and does something there that I’d deny in front of a doctor.

“Makes you do the unhinged shit that turns me on.”

“You’re trying to replace me.”

“You and I both know Mori’s not here to replace anyone.”

I hate it when he talks sense.

It angers me at a structural level. It gets under the slab. Because he’s right, and I know he’s right, and knowing it doesn’t do a single thing about the pressure in my chest, and the only thing that does is his mouth.

So I take it.

His scent goes first. It always does. Frozen juniper, blackcurrant, mint, and then under it the white musk heating, hot rising through cold, the thing that happens to him when he’s decided something is his. It’s happening now, and it’s happening for me, and the relief of that is so sharp I could put my fist through his desk.

Mine’s answering. I can feel it. The vetiver going heavy, the pine sharpening, clove, tea, and the smoke I’m not supposed to smell of. Two Alphas’ scents in a closed room, colliding, and neither of us pulling ours in.

We’ve never once pulled them in for each other. That’s the whole point.

I’m down, and I’ve got his face in my other hand, and I’m kissing him like a madman looking for a high in the middle of a rage he can’t name. Possessive. That’s the closest. A territorial thing, an animal thing, the need to put my mouth on something and have it be mine.

Mori’s come into our world and gotten his attention without trying, and I hate it, and I don’t hate her, and both of those things are true at once, and right now I want his eyes on me and nowhere else.

I’m learning something about myself. I’m bad at sharing.

Here’s the arithmetic I’ve been refusing.

The thing between Niko and me started on a bathroom floor freshman year, on a night I don’t remember, and it started as him refusing to let me sleep alone afterward. That’s all it was for a season. A body in the room. A weight on the mattress that meant somebody would notice if I got up and walked.