Page 29 of Slashed Bonds

“Paler.” A beat. “There’s five hundred tucked into the boxing card.”

I bite down on my bottom lip to stop whatever wants to come out of me from coming out.

Say thank you. Two words. People do this constantly.

I nod instead.

Coward.

“Text whenever,” he says, settling back against the pillows, naked and entirely unbothered, mask still covering a face I’ve decided is sculpted like a masterpiece, since I’ve had two and a half years to build the theory and no evidence to ruin it.

I get the toys back into the bag, tuck the cards into my jacket beside a matte black one with a viper on it, and go to the door.

My hand is on the handle.

Leave. That’s the arrangement. You leave.

I don’t.

“His name is Knox,” I say to the door. “My dog.”

That’s all.

No context, no explanation, nothing else attached, which in this room amounts to handing a stranger a piece of my actual life.

The first piece. In two and a half years.

The pause behind me lasts a heartbeat.

“Tell Knox Daddy says hi.”

I leave then, but I don’t fight the smirk that forms on my lips.

CHAPTER 3

One Man's Trash

~NIKOLAI~

Ipull on the cigarette until the cherry burns down a quarter inch, hold it, and let the smoke go at the ceiling in a slow gray column.

She’s been gone forty minutes.

The room still has her in it.

That’s the problem, isn’t it.

Black cherry. Crushed plum. Night jasmine sitting underneath the two of them like a bass line, and threaded through all of it, that cold streak. Winter air off a frozen lake. A thing that has no business in a scent that sweet, and holds the whole arrangement together anyway.

The first night we did this, she apologized for it.

In advance.

Stood in the middle of this room with her mask on and her chin up like a woman waiting to be sentenced, and told me her scent was wrong. Damaged. That it wouldn’t smell the way an Omega is supposed to smell, and if that was a dealbreaker she’d rather hear it now than watch my face do something behind the mask.

Disgusting.

That was the word she used.