Page 204 of Slashed Bonds

Oh, Meg. Oh, I’ve missed you.

Naomi makes a sound in her nose.

“You’re lucky I don’t have time to be sorting through various stores for stupid equipment. If my assistant weren’t sick she’d be doing this bullshit.” A shake of the head, the blowout swinging. “I need the set for myself. Size small. I want it fitted. Nice and snug. To accentuate my curves.”

Meg looks at her.

Long. Hard. Up, and then down, and then up again, with the full weight of twenty years of fitting women’s bodies into equipment built for them, and if a look could read a room then Meg has read this one out loud, because all three of us can see what she’s seeing.

Curves. Girl. Which ones.

Naomi Vance has the body of a woman who does pilates for the photographs. Long, narrow, flat front and back, not an ounce of the mass you build when you’re training a body to be a machine that has to take a hit and give one. There’s no plump to her anywhere. She’s never had a thigh scream on a third-period shift. She’s never needed a girdle for anything but the look of it.

“I’ll work on it,” Meg says.

“Good. Make it snappy. I need to try it on and show my Alphas so they can purchase.”

My Alphas.

The words land in my mouth like something spoiled.

Because that’s who they are now. Hers. The men I thought were mine when I was eighteen and didn’t know what mine could cost. The good boys. The ones who were supposed to be the pillars, who stood in a parking lot and said ours after rehearsing it, who I’d have followed into any building in the world.

The Alpha who’d have been the father.

Don’t. Not here. Not with her perfume in the room.

She turns her head.

As if she felt it. The way they say Omegas feel each other’s attention, a prickle at the nape, and her eyes come across the store and land on us, on the pink and the green and the black between them, and I watch recognition happen on her face.

It takes a second. Then it doesn’t.

Her eyes drop to the bags in my hands.

The top of the left one’s open. A glove’s sitting there, split cuff up, the Arclight logo plain as a signature, and I watch her read it, and I watch her understand that the Omega she threw out of a second-floor window is standing in a hockey store holding the set she came for.

Karma works overtime. Don’t we love her when she does.

And a thought comes up behind the first one, cooler, from a place in me that’s been quiet for two weeks and is now sitting up.

Can she work a touch harder? On this one? Maybe she needs help. Maybe she needs some intentional manifestation from yours truly.

Naomi grins.

Wide. Satisfied, like she’s been handed a thing she wanted more than gloves, and she pushes off Meg’s counter and waltzes toward us with her bag swinging.

Maddie groans. Out loud, the sound of a woman who does not have time for this. Viper’s looking Naomi up and down the way she looks at everything, unimpressed, cataloguing, and I see her clock the coat and the shoes and the phone in the hand and file all three.

Naomi stops in front of us.

And my shields move.

Not away. To my sides. Maddie steps right and Viper steps left, and they don’t hide me anymore, they flank me, and I’m standing in the middle with two women at my shoulders like a point between two wingers. Support. Not protection. They’re telling me, without a word, that this is mine to stand in.

Thank you. Both of you. I’ll say it later.

“And look who it is.”