Page 113 of Slashed Bonds

And I’m not even against it. If she’s fucking Cash, then the captain’s occupied, and the goalie’s on the floor, and there’s a version of the next hour where I take this madman apart for the sake of the plot, and nobody’s going to come looking for either of us.

“Wouldn’t you want that, big boy?” Nikolai taunts.

Then, flatter: “Go away before my back’s in pain for no reason. I need a nap.”

I huff.

I get off the floor. I don’t help him up, and that makes him laugh again, because he knows I’m angry, and he knows why, and he’s enjoying every second of it.

He’s always enjoyed it. That’s the part of him nobody outside this floor gets to see. Nikolai in a room with a stranger is a knife with a smile painted on it. Nikolai on a floor with me is a man who’ll take a bruised spine for the pleasure of watching me lose an argument with myself.

Four years. He’s never once lost that argument for me. He waits.

I hate being denied things.

I’ve never once been good at it.

So I’m at the door. Hand on the knob. Looking at it for a long minute, the way you’d look at a lane you’ve decided to close.

Then I close the door.

And I lock it.

Because why the fuck am I retreating when the grand prize is on the floor behind me with his arms crossed?

I turn.

He’s still there. Flat on his back next to the overturned chair, arms folded across his chest, and he’s looking at my face, at whatever’s in it, with the biggest grin of triumph I’ve ever seen on that handsome, cynical, freckled face.

“Would you look at that,” he says. “My baby hungry?”

“Damn fucking straight.”

I’m fucking famished.

CHAPTER 14

The Dance Between Jealousy and Obsession

~KILLIAN~

He doesn’t get up.

That’s the first insult, and he knows it—Nikolai Volkov has never once in four years let an insult be an accident.

He’s still sprawled on his back beside the overturned chair, arms folded behind his head like a man sunning himself on a beach, except there’s blood smeared at the corner of his mouth—my blood—and that infuriating grin hasn’t shifted an inch.

My daddy is so fucking hungry.

I’m still standing over him, the lock thrown, my pulse thrumming against my teeth.

The sensible version of the next hour involves me unlocking that door, walking down the hall to find Monarch, and pretending I came in here for intel and not for this raw, stupid pull between us.

Sensible left the building the second my hand closed around his throat.

“Get up,” I say.

“No.”