Page 5 of Slashed Bonds

It’s the other thing.

The one nobody can splint.

Four threads running out of the mark at the back of my neck, out into the dark, where four men are attached to the other ends.

I can feel every one of them from here.

Theo, low and steady, like a bell in another room. Rhys, warm as a hand at my back. Silas, quiet, always slightly cold. Dorian, restless, never still for more than a minute.

They’ve been closed to me for eleven days.

Not gone. Shuttered.

The way a house is shuttered while the family is still inside, deciding not to answer the door.

None of them has come.

That’s the part I keep circling like a drain.

My family is gone. My name is being burned down in public.

My dog is⁠—

And not one of the four men wired into my nervous system has walked through a door and said her name is Mori and this is a lie.

The true reality is, I know the root cause of their dismal.

I know why.

I’ve known since the night Naomi Vance Hallwick sat across from me in the players’ lounge with her ankles crossed and her scent turned up like a stovetop and asked me, in the tone you’d use for borrowing a phone charger, to step aside and hand over my pack.

I laughed at her.

That’s my crime.

That’s the whole indictment.

I laughed at a woman whose father funds two-thirds of this organization, and she’s spent five months converting one laugh into an invoice.

She’s used to receiving. Whatever her heart lands on arrives, gift-wrapped, on schedule.

Apparently the list includes four men I’ve loved since I could lace my own skates.

There’s no law in this country that covers what she’s done. I looked. Two in the morning, phone with a cracked screen, until the words stopped meaning anything.

So we’re doing it the other way.

I straighten. I wipe my face with the back of my wrist, above the gauze. I set my shoulders like I’m stepping into the circle for a draw I intend to win.

Fifteen minutes. Then a plan.

I open the door.

A hand closes on my throat before I finish the step.

Not a fist. A palm and five fingers, wide enough to span jaw to collarbone, and it lifts and turns me in one motion and puts my spine into the corridor wall hard enough to knock a sound out of me I don’t recognize.

I fight.