Page 51 of Slashed Bonds

She hisses it, twisting. Behind me, Killian has rolled to his feet and gotten Nik in a headlock from behind, one arm hooked under the jaw, the other braced against the back of the skull, textbook, and he’s saying something in that dropped voice, low, steady, unbroken, the way you’d talk to a horse in a burning barn.

I’ve got her.

I’m turning her away from it. I’m going to carry this woman ten feet down the concourse and set her down where she can’t get her skull cracked by a goalie who doesn’t recognize her right now, and then I’m going to…

She bites me.

Through the shirt. Into the meat of my shoulder, right at the edge of the trapezius, and she does not do it gently.

I flinch. The whole body flinches, because it hurts like a motherfucker. Then, riding in a half second behind the pain, something else. Warm. Wrong. A bolt of pleasure that goes straight down my spine and lands somewhere it has no business landing in the middle of a brawl in my own lobby.

What the fuck…

My foot catches on my other foot.

We go down together. I get a hand under her head on the way, which is the only competent thing I do in the whole sequence, and we hit the black stone in a heap, her on top, me on the bottom, and the breath goes out of me in a sound I’d deny in court.

For one second she’s braced over me, palms flat on the stone either side of my head, and the jacket sleeves have ridden up to her elbows.

And I see her arms.

Four ridges across each forearm. Thick, silvered, raised enough to throw a shadow under the lobby lights. All at the same angle. All the same length. Not the random geometry of an accident. Somebody laid those down with a ruler.

Ink runs around them, through them, over them. Nightshade, thorns, something with wings. None of it hides a single one. She had the artist work around the scars instead of over them.

She wanted them visible. She wanted people to have to look.

I’ve spent three years learning to read what a man is hiding. It hasn’t occurred to me until this moment that a person could hide nothing and still be unreadable.

Her eyes meet mine from ten inches away. Whatever’s in mine, she sees it, and her mouth flattens, and she pushes off my chest hard enough to hurt.

Noted.

Don’t look at the arms.

I’m going to look at the arms.

“What the fuc…”

Killian’s voice, from above, ending in a crack.

Because she’s already off me. Up on one knee, then both feet, and as Killian leans toward us to see if I’m dead she drives her elbow back, up, and clean under his jaw without ever looking at him.

He goes over backward. Nik comes loose from the headlock.

This is a disaster. This is a fucking disaster.

I’m up, cursing, scrambling on the polished stone in boots with no grip, and every projection I can run says the same thing: Nik is loose, Nik is feral, and the only thing between him and the door is a hundred and forty pounds of Omega who bites.

He’s going to hit her. He’s going to hit her and not know he did it until tomorrow, and it’ll kill him, and I’ll have to watch.

She plants herself in front of him.

Fists clenched at her sides. Feet set. Not braced to run. Braced to receive.

And the whole building changes temperature.

I’ve felt it once before.