Page 155 of Slashed Bonds

He leans down and kisses my forehead.

Tender. The press of a mouth against my hairline, held for a second longer than a joke would hold, and then gone, and my face does something I don’t authorize.

Forehead. He kissed my forehead. I’ve had his cock in my mouth and that’s the thing that lands.

My father used to do that. On the bench, after a loss, when I’d have my helmet off and my face in my hands. One hand on the back of my head, his mouth against my hairline, no words. Then he’d go talk to the coach and leave me there, and I’d put the helmet back on.

I haven’t thought about that in five years. I’ve been careful not to.

And this man did it without knowing, in a boxing ring, with sand on his back, and I’m going to have to decide what to do with that too.

“Let me go get the small menace of a troublemaker.”

“Knox isn’t causing trou…”

The fire alarm goes off.

A shriek, electric, from every speaker in the building at once, and a half second behind it the sprinklers open, every head in the ceiling, and we’re drenched before either of us has moved.

We stare at each other.

Water running off his hair into his eyes. Water running down my face, my tank going transparent, sand on the floor turning to paste. Both of us standing in a boxing ring in a monsoon at seven in the morning, trying to understand what has happened to our lives.

I don’t laugh. That’s a thing people who know me would say, if I had people who knew me. Maddie’s heard it maybe four times in three years and marks the date each time. The woman in the oatmeal chair has written flat affect in a file so often she probably has a stamp.

And then we’re laughing.

Both of us. Hard. The kind that doubles you over, that takes the legs out from under it and the breath with it, and I’ve got both arms around my stomach and I swear to god I nearly piss myself, which would be a problem except that we’re standing in an indoor rainstorm and nobody would ever know.

“WOOF!”

Knox is back.

He enters the ring at full speed, soaked, delighted, the happiest creature in any building in the county, and he hits Nikolai at the chest, and Nikolai goes down without a fight. Flat on his back in the sand paste with eighty pounds of wet dog standing on him.

“And we found the menace,” he concludes, from the floor.

The two Alphas come skidding into the room behind him. Soaked. Winded. Staff shirts plastered to their chests, their faces are the faces of men who’ve chased a dog through a building, lost, and are about to explain that to the man who owns it.

“Boss! We don’t know how the dog got in. We…”

Nikolai lifts one hand off the floor. Palm out. The other hand’s on Knox’s ribs, rubbing.

“He’s ours.”

Flat. Final. He tips his head toward me without taking his eyes off the dog.

“My girl. Our dog. Don’t worry about whatever got broken. I’ll have it fixed by tomorrow. Get the fire alarm sorted.”

They both nod.

Then they look at me.

Soaked, in a see-through tank, hair in my face, standing in a ring beside their boss who’s on the floor under a dog, and they look at me like men who’ve been handed a piece of information they didn’t know they were allowed to have.

My girl. In front of staff. He said it like a fact he’d already filed.

Four boys said ours to me in a parking lot once, having rehearsed, and I cried. This one said my girl to two employees from the floor of a boxing ring with a wet dog on his chest, and I didn’t cry, and I don’t know which of those is the better sign.