Page 142 of Slashed Bonds

“She needs to wean off what she’s on.” He hands the cigarette back. “Which is going to be a pain in the ass on her body. She might get sick as fuck.”

My frown gets deeper.

I’ve seen her pale. I’ve seen her asleep on Niko’s chest with her face the color of the sheet, and that did dangerous things to the architecture of my head. I don’t want to picture worse.

“You think Dox can do something?”

We share a look.

Dox. Dominic, on his license, though nobody’s called him that in a decade. Vicious Ink, in the basement under a laundromat in the city, where the three of us have spent more hours than we’ve spent in any classroom.

“Probably,” Nikolai drawls. Slow. Working it through. “He could put something in the ink. Something that’d ease the counter-effects while she tapers.”

He goes quiet for a second, thinking.

“Problem, though.”

“What?”

“We’d need an Omega to tattoo her.”

“Because?”

“Because I’m not letting a fucking Alpha ink our girl.”

I roll my eyes.

“Possessive motherfucker.”

I say it dismissively. But he’s right, for reasons that have nothing to do with possession, and we both know it.

The ink’s medicine.

That’s the thing nobody outside this floor knows. The reason three unbonded Alphas with files can live in a house together and not go feral by Thanksgiving. Every tattoo on us was done at Vicious Ink, and every one of them went in with a compound in the pigment, and every one of them bleeds that compound into the bloodstream over months, slow, steady, a dose you don’t have to remember to take.

It tames the chemistry. It’s why we’re not off the hinge. It’s why we’re not in a facility with white walls.

The same thing works on an Omega. Dox has said so. But the dosing’s different, by a factor I don’t know, and with Mori as fit as she is, as lean as she is, she’ll process it faster than any of us, and getting it wrong isn’t a bad tattoo.

Getting it wrong is a woman on a bathroom floor.

Niko was first. Seventeen, in a bad stretch, before I knew him, before Cash knew him, a kid with a Switch and no pack and a doctor who’d started using words like facility. Somebody in a rink told him about a basement under a laundromat where a man did work that wasn’t on any menu, and he went, and he came out with a piece on his ribs and a chemistry that would hold for four months.

He’s never told me what the first piece was. He’s never let me see it in good light.

I was second. Freshman year, after the bathroom floor. Cash drove me into the city with my head against the window and walked me down a flight of stairs that smelled of detergent and burnt sugar, and Dox looked at me for a long time without saying anything and then said, “Sit.”

The compound’s slow. That’s the point of it. A pill is a cliff. You take it and you’re up and then you’re down and the down is where I used to live. The ink’s a slope. You can stand on a slope.

Three years. The dose Cash keeps in a bottle in his room is the backup. The ink is the system. And nobody at Bellwether or anywhere like it has ever once offered a woman like Mori a slope.

And an Omega artist would know the Omega dosing. An Alpha wouldn’t. Niko’s right. He’s right in the most annoying way available.

“I can look into it,” I say.

I don’t know an Omega who inks. I know Omegas, and I know people who ink, and the overlap’s a thing I’ve never had a reason to look for. But Maddie knows everyone who’s ever worn pink in three counties, and Maddie owes Greenie a conversation, and Greenie owes me for a skate guard.

Chain of favors. It’s how buildings get built.