Page 287 of Slashed Bonds

“Then how—“ Cassian. Quiet. From the window.

“Because fertile isn’t pregnant,” Val says. “The ink balanced her. That’s all it does. To get from balanced to this—“ She tips her chin at the gray smear on the screen. “—an Omega has to be bonded. Her nervous system has to be reading a pack and finding it steady enough to allow it. Not a contract. Not a roster. A pack, in the body’s sense. Three Alphas aligned enough with her and with each other that her chemistry stops bracing for the next hit and starts planning for a year from now.”

She looks at the four of us. At the hands. Three monarchs and a crown, and one monarch with two small shapes on a finger.

“You four getting the same tattoo was the catalyst. A new bond, where the old one was burned out. The pigment registered each of your biological patterns, it’s in the panel, it’s in all four of your panels, and once it had all four it did the thing instincts do when they’ve been waiting a long time for permission. It went. Alpha and Omega, all at once. That’s why the energy spike. That’s why a goalie put a seagull on the asphalt.” A shrug. “You weren’t high. You were bonding. It feels the same from the inside.”

Nobody speaks.

Bonded.

Not through the nape. Not through a receptor somebody burned out with a vial. Through my hand. Through a thing I chose, in a chair, in a basement, with three men who chose it too without being asked, and a woman who put a door back where a wall had been and didn’t tell me, because telling me wasn’t her business.

I look at Nikolai. His mouth’s open. He closes it. Opens it again. Says nothing, which for Nikolai is a speech.

Killian’s looking at his hand. The back of it, the monarch, turning it under the fluorescent light the way he looked at a crown on his finger in a chair, like a man re-reading a load calculation and finding the number he got was right and the reason was wrong.

Cassian hasn’t moved. But his eyes have come off the window and they’re on me, gray, and there’s a thing in them I saw once on a frozen ridge when my hand was in his.

A knock.

Viper opens the door without looking away from the room, and a woman in scrubs comes through it sideways, because she has to, because she’s carrying flowers.

A bouquet the size of Knox.

White roses, the big kind, hundreds of them, in a vase that’s got weight to it, with eucalyptus and something dark red threaded through, and a card on a stick, and the woman in scrubs sets the whole thing on the counter by the sink and says, “Special delivery. From the Vane family,” and leaves.

We all look at Cassian.

He frowns.

“I didn’t send anything.”

White. Color’s for signs. His mother doesn’t know that rule. Or she does and she’s broken it with the red on purpose.

Maddie’s already got the card. She reaches for it the way she reaches for everything, first, with pink nails, and pulls it off the stick and opens it and reads, and her voice changes as she goes, from bright to something careful.

“Congratulations, Mori and Pack.“ A breath. “I can’t wait for us to discuss all the things when it comes to parenthood. But until then, here’s a small gift of aspiration, in preparation for the immense love and spoiling you’ll receive from a family who has already taken you in as one of our own.“

She stops. Looks up at me.

“Welcome to the Vanes, Morrigan.“

Welcome.

I don’t have anywhere to put that. I’d like to be honest about it. A woman I met for ninety seconds in a ballroom in a dress made of diamonds and ink has written one of our own on a card and sent it to a clinic with a hundred white roses, and I’ve got a needle in my arm and a goalie in my bed and nowhere in my body to put a thing like that.

“She knows?” Nikolai. Frowning. “How does she know?”

“Mother’s intuition, probably,” Val offers.

“P.S.” Maddie, still reading, turning the card over. “I know, because my son would never drink a mocktail at an event as prestigious as that. He gets nervous as fuck—“ She looks up. “She wrote ‘as fuck.’ Your mother wrote ‘as fuck’ on a florist’s card.”

“Keep reading,” Cassian says. Flat. Resigned.

“—and needs an alcoholic beverage to relax him enough to project confidence, but also to keep him from losing his mind. If my son is sober at a gala, something in his life has become more important than the gala. Love, M.“

Silence.