Page 234 of Slashed Bonds

I watch him go while I dance. He’s not heading for the door. He’s heading for the kitchen, where the two jackets were, and the two jackets aren’t there anymore, and his head turns once toward the stairs and stays turned.

Upstairs. Where the rooms are. Where a boy with a cereal bowl woke up tied to a bed, or didn’t wake up.

I almost follow. I don’t. He said stay where he could see me and I’ve already broken the drinks rule, and I’m not going to break two in one night, and the earring in my left ear is warm against my skin like it’s listening harder than I am.

Viper. I hope you’re getting this. I hope the laptop’s open. I hope you brought a jacket, it’s cold in that car.

I go to the bar.

There’s one. Somebody’s dining room table with a black cloth over it and a boy behind it who looks sixteen, and I take the stool at the end and ask for something brown and he gives me something brown, and I sit, and I sip, and I look at the room.

Zoned out. The way you go after four drinks and an hour of dancing and a kiss with teeth in it. The room goes to color and motion. Red light, bodies, the glass over the door shaking with the bass. I watch it the way you watch a fire.

The room smells like a hundred people trying. Alpha musk gone sour with sweat, Omega perfumes fighting each other for the air, the sugar-and-plastic of the orange in the coolers coming through the kitchen door every time it swings. Spilled beer in the carpet. Somebody’s weed from a window. And under all of it, faint, a scent I keep catching and losing, slick, sweet, wrong, an Omega somewhere in this house who’s gone past drunk into the thing the orange does.

One of them. Upstairs, maybe. Killian’s upstairs. If she’s lucky, Killian’s upstairs.

I turn the glass in my hand and I don’t drink from it yet.

Then I catch the scent.

And the world buzzes away.

That’s the only way to say it. The music goes under. The color goes flat. Every sense I own narrows to a single channel and hyper focuses on one thing in the room, the way a goalie’s eyes find a puck through traffic, and the one thing is a scent I’d know in my grave.

Amber. Cologne, expensive, laid over a thing that used to smell like a kitchen on Alder Row and now smells like a hallway I waited in with my knees shaking.

No.

My lazed eyes come up. Track the room. Find him.

Theo.

Standing in the middle of the dancing chaos like it’s parting around him, which it is, because men like Theo have never once in their lives had to move for anyone. Dark hair, still cut the way it was. The jaw. A shirt open at the collar and a watch I remember him buying with money that was supposed to be for a semester’s ice time.

And his eyes are locked on me.

Taking me in. All of me, the dress and the hair and the red mouth and the ink on my arms and my neck, with an expression I’ve never seen on his face, because he’s never looked at anything he didn’t expect to see. He looks like a man staring at a ghost that’s grown a body.

I’m expected to feel something. What. Fear? That’s the one, isn’t it. That’s what this moment is built for.

I check.

Theo never danced. I think that, standing on a stool with my drink gone, out of nowhere. At Halbrook the parties were his, in houses his family paid for, and he stood at the edge with his arms folded and let the room come to him, and I’d dance alone in the middle of it for the pleasure of being watched by him. I thought it was love. A man who didn’t need to move because the room moved for him.

It wasn’t love. It was inventory. He was counting what he owned.

It’s a habit now, the checking. Fear, no. Uncertainty, no. Nothing’s going cold, nothing’s tunneling, there’s no fourteen-year-old on a windowsill rising up behind my eyes.

And I understand why.

Either the whisky has made me numb to the shape of this, or something’s happened, somewhere between the fourth drink and the scent, and Malice is in the driver’s seat.

Oh. Hello. When did you.

I didn’t feel the handover. There was no click. No bolt sliding home. One second I was a drunk woman on a stool and the next I was looking at Theo Ross across a dance floor through eyes that were already cold, and the transition was so seamless I can’t find the seam.

Maybe that’s why the world’s gone numb. She’s turned the sound off so she can work.