Page 52 of Slashed Bonds

Fourth line, first year, a scrum in front of the net, and some Alpha from Ashford put a glove in my face, and I felt something go through the ice under my skates like a current. It’s not a scent. It’s under scent. It’s whatever the scent is made of.

It comes off her now.

“Kneel.”

One word.

Nik stops.

Dead in his tracks. Not calm. The opposite. His lips peel back from his teeth and he snarls into her face from six inches away, a sound I’ve heard him make at forwards who crashed his crease, a sound that has emptied benches.

It doesn’t move her.

Not an inch. Not an eyelash.

And I have, apparently, the best angle in the building. Because I watch her mouth, and I watch it curve, and it’s a grin, and it isn’t a nice one. It’s the grin of someone who has been waiting a long time for a fight worth having and has finally been handed one.

Fuck.

My cock twitches.

In the middle of this. In the wreckage of my own lobby, with Killian bleeding from the mouth and my goalie snarling like a dog with rabies. Because this cynical bitch is hot as fuck when she grins like a maniac, and I’d like it on record that I’m not proud of what my body does with that information.

“Kneel.”

She repeats herself, and there’s a bite in it this time. An edge. The word doesn’t get louder. It gets narrower. Like she isn’t going to say it a third time, and there’s a version of the next thirty seconds where nobody would want her to.

The growl changes.

It drops. Stutters. Thins out.

And then we watch, all three of us, Killian with a hand at his split lip and me on my knees on the stone, as the most feral Alpha I have ever known goes down.

Slow. One knee, then the other. A trajectory that should be studied, because in three years nobody has ever pulled Nik out of this state without a wall, a needle, or a night in the trainer’s room.

Except her.

Malice.

The dog trots over and sits down beside him. Panting. Pleased. As though he’s a good boy too, for kneeling before his master, and would like that noted.

Her grin spreads.

But her attention is nowhere near us.

It’s on her prize, and only her prize, and she reaches down and takes his chin in her hand, not gently, and forces his head up until he’s looking her in the eye.

I don’t know what passes between them.

Nothing I can read, and I read everything. Some transaction in a currency I don’t hold. But his lips part, and she leans down, and she spits into his open mouth.

Then she kisses him.

It’s the sloppiest kiss I’ve ever witnessed. It’s graceless, open, wet, all tongue and teeth with no technique whatsoever, and it’s the most turned on I’ve been by anything in a dangerously long time, and I’m aware of both facts at once and don’t know what to do with either.

When she pulls back, she takes his bottom lip between her teeth on the way out.

Hard.