Page 24 of Slashed Bonds

Not grabbed. Caught. One arm under my ribs, one hand behind my head so my skull didn’t find the baseboard, and the whole motion so controlled it barely registered as movement.

And here’s the part I still don’t have a satisfying answer for.

He was blindfolded.

That was the mask he’d chosen that night. Black fabric across his eyes, which the house allows and a certain kind of client requests, and which means the man was walking that corridor without the use of his own eyes.

And he caught a falling woman he could not see.

He heard me go. He must have. The change in my breathing, or the way a body sounds a half second before it quits, and he crossed the hall on that alone.

Two and a half years later I still take that memory out on bad nights and turn it over like a coin.

He got me sitting. He didn’t call an attendant, because I said don’t, and he was the first person in two years to hear the word don’t from me and comply without argument. He put water in my hand. He waited it out, blindfolded, in a corridor, for eleven minutes.

Then he asked whether I wanted him to leave.

I said no.

One look was all it took after that, and by look I mean the moment he pushed the blindfold up onto his forehead and I saw those eyes for the first time.

It’s giving love story for the romantically deprived, isn’t it?

And that’s the arrangement. Two and a half years of it. No names, no faces, no questions that would make either of us a person to the other.

The Underground itself is nothing like the name suggests.

It sits under a building that files its taxes as a wellness and recovery centre, and the interior was designed by somebody who understood that people with reputations need corridors without sightlines. Private entrances. Staggered arrival windows. Attendants who take your coat while looking at a fixed point over your shoulder.

Everything is charcoal and low amber and sound-deadening panel, and the whole place smells expensive and scrubbed, with the pheromone filtration running so hard that scent arrives in fragments instead of waves.

Which is the mercy of it, honestly.

A building full of Alphas in rut with no filtration would put me on the floor inside four minutes.

There’s a lounge on the lower level with leather booths and a wall of muted screens, and the screens are always showing sport, and that has produced some of the strangest half hours of my life. Sitting there masked in a booth watching a game while three feet away a man in a wolf mask does the same, both of us pretending we don’t recognize each other’s shoulders.

Afterward, the room settles into that particular quiet. Heat leaving my skin in sheets. My heart coming down out of the rafters. The ceiling above me painted a shade of charcoal chosen by somebody who understood exactly which clientele would be looking at it.

I lie there for a minute and take stock.

The nausea is gone.

That’s the trade. Twelve hours from now the vise around my skull will have loosened, my hands will have stopped shaking, and I’ll be able to look at the world without wanting to bite a chunk out of it.

My pussy is thrilled, incidentally.

Because pierced dick?

Chef’s kiss.

I roll off the bed and start collecting my clothes off the floor, since I never wash up here. The showers are immaculate. I’ve used them twice. Both times I stood under the water with my back to the tile and my eyes on the door, which defeats the purpose.

I’ll shower at home, where the locks are mine.

He watches me dress.

He always does. Propped against the pillows with an arm folded behind his head, tracking me across the room like I’m something he’s studying.