Page 132 of Slashed Bonds

The sky’s gone from ash to pewter behind her. The frost has started to shine. Somewhere down the hill, a door has opened in Viper House, and a dog is coming up the service road at a dead run, because a dog knows when it’s been left out of something.

Let him come. Let all of them come. She’s going to need every one of us, and she’s going to hate that, and she’s going to have us anyway.

A shame, truly.

Because there’s one thing my father and I have never once agreed on.

Patience.

He waited years. He let them walk, and marry, and sleep, so that when the end came they’d have something to lose.

I’ve never had that in me. Not on a dot, not in a boardroom, not here.

And our rejected Monarch…will no longer wait for her throne.

CHAPTER 17

I'm In Your Domain

~MORRIGAN~

“This is overkill. I don’t need a stupid bath.”

I huff it from inside the bath.

Already in it. Up to my collarbones in water hot enough to pink the skin, under a drift of bubbles that somebody in this house of twenty-two Alphas apparently owns, eyes half open, fighting a tide of exhaustion that keeps trying to close them the rest of the way.

Cassian’s on the floor.

Sitting against the opposite wall, parallel to the tub, one knee up, forearm resting on it. Close enough to reach me if I go under. Far enough that it isn’t a threat.

Lifeguard. That’s the posture. He’s making sure I don’t drown.

Valid, I guess.

I lost my mind on a running path at five in the morning in front of a man I’ve known a week, and I’m not sure yet whether the technical term for that is a crash-out or an attempt. There’s a woman in an oatmeal chair who’d want to discuss the difference. There’s an index card in my jacket with a number on it.

Later. Both of those are later.

There’s a version of this morning where I’m in a different bath, in a different building, with a Beta in orthopedic shoes sitting in the doorway turning magazine pages loud. I know that building. I know its exact smell. And I know that what I did on that path, in that building, gets you the chair in the door for a week and a note in a file that follows you.

He didn’t call anyone. He didn’t say the word. He ran a bath.

That’s either the kindest thing anyone’s done for me in five years, or the most dangerous, and I’ve spent too long in wards to be sure which.

The house is empty.

That’s the other thing. Viper House, which has never once been quiet in the six days I’ve slept in it, is silent enough that I can hear the water settle when I move. No boots on the stairs. No second line in the kitchen. No Greenie narrating. No eighty pounds of dog thumping down a hallway.

Nobody.

Practice is at nine. It’s eight-forty. The whole roster’s at the rink, and I’m not, and I don’t know what he said to Halloran, and I don’t know what he said to Killian and Niko, who’d have noticed an empty bed and an empty bath and a captain who wasn’t on the ice the day before a game.

He got rid of them. All of them. For this.

I’ll have to give up trying to unravel how. Some things in this building don’t come with a diagram.

I heard one side of it, through the bathroom door, while the water was running.