Page 28 of Slashed Bonds

Tell them to ring him.

Which means the people at that club know exactly who he is, and would move if he asked.

I file that with everything else I’ve filed about him, in a folder I’ve never once opened.

“Pole’s unlimited too,” he continues. “If it’s not to your taste, say so next time. We’ll swap it for something else.”

Another drag. The smoke crawls up past the mask and hangs in the dark.

“And toys and treats for the pup. Obvious reasoning.”

I look at the bag. At the puck-shaped rubber thing.

Something in my chest does a maneuver I don’t authorize.

Because it isn’t the money.

The money is nothing. Everyone in this building has money.

It’s that he asked me eleven months ago what I like doing, and then wrote it down somewhere in that head of his, and then went out and bought a bag of dog toys.

For a dog he’s never met. Belonging to a woman whose name he doesn’t know.

My throat tightens.

So I do what I do.

“Now do I bend over and put a leg in the air so you can get a different angle?” I ask. “Or is that scheduled?”

I should say thank you.

A normal person says thank you.

I lost normal somewhere around the second floor, along with the girl who used it.

This new version of me can’t get the words out of her mouth. They stick, halfway up, and burn, because the last time I thanked an Alpha for taking care of me I was seventeen years old and stupid with it.

“Next time, Malice,” he says.

So casual. Like the name has always been there.

Malice.

I still don’t know why he started calling me that. It arrived one night without ceremony, the way everything does with him, and I liked it enough that I let it stay.

I started using it a year ago. First with Sully. Then at the rinks. Then everywhere.

Nobody calls me Morrigan now.

Which is the point.

Morrigan Crowe was a girl with a family and a future and a pack. Morrigan Crowe got thrown out a window.

Malice climbed out of the hole.

“You’re pale today,” he says. “Go eat something. Sleep.”

“I’m always pale.”