I caught her wrist before she could pull it back from my collar.
Her pulse kicked against my thumb. The Bond Resonance carried the spike straight into my chest like a defibrillator padded in pink cashmere, and I held her there, turned her hand over so the inside of her wrist faced up, and pressed my mouth to the skin where the vein ran blue and warm.
"Hello, my love."
The kiss was soft and specific and placed with the kind of deliberate care that Diane would have called brand positioning and that I called knowing exactly where Sloane Fitzgerald’s nervous system kept its emergency override switch. Her pulse jumped a second time under my lips, harder, and I felt the hitch travel through her forearm into her shoulder into the breath she caught and held for one point six seconds before she yanked her hand free.
"Don’t."
"Don’t what."
"Don’t hello my love me in a room where I can still smell whatever happened before I got here."
She stood up off the table and walked three steps toward the window, her boots sharp on the floor, her ponytail swinging in the specific arc that meant she was calculating how much structural damage she could cause before anyone filed paperwork. The afternoon light caught the choker at her throat and the tight line of her jaw and the way her shoulders squared beneath the Halloran blazer in a formation that said I am not fooled and I am deciding what to do about it and the decision will involve your suffering.
I stayed seated. Staying seated was the move. Standing would look defensive, and I was not defensive, I was guilty and intelligent enough to know the difference.
"Sloane."
"No."
"I didn’t do anything that—"
"You have a bruise on your neck." She said it to the window. "Below the collar. Left side. It wasn’t there when you kissed me at the quad this morning because I checked, I always check, and now it’s there and it’s fresh and it’s in the shape of somebody’s mouth and that somebody is not me because I haven’t been near your neck since last night when I bit you in a different spot which I also checked this morning because I am a thorough person Lukas Belmont."
The entire sentence arrived without punctuation or breath, which is how Sloane delivers kill shots. Not louder but faster, stacking clauses until the weight collapses the target.
I touched my collar. The left side. Below where Petra had put her mouth forty minutes ago in this exact room while saying something in French that I was going to remember for the rest of my natural and extended five-hundred-year lifespan.
"I can explain."
"I know you can explain. You can explain anything. You explained a tactical kiss to a nationally broadcast news camera and Professor Crane used it in a lesson plan. You explained late manifestation to a federal diagnostician and she signed paperwork. You could explain a house fire to the house and the house would apologize for being flammable." She turned from the window and her blue eyes hit mine like twin concussive charges set at staggered intervals. "I don’t want an explanation. I want you to stand there and understand that I know."
I stood there.
I understood.
The Bond Resonance pulsed between us in a frequency that carried no words, only the texture of Sloane’s interior. She was not furious. Fury was loud and hot and came with the smell of ozone and the crackle of kinetic energy building at her fingertips, and her fingers were still, curled at her sides, her palms flat against her thighs. What she felt was worse than fury because it was quiet and heavy and patient and it sat in the low register of the bond where the things Sloane actually meant lived when she ran out of volume to hide them behind.
She was hurt.
Not surprised. Hurt.
"I know what you are," she said. "I knew when I agreed to this. I knew when I kissed you the first time in that theater and I knew when you came home smelling like vanilla and I knew when Mama called and said three agencies pulled your file in the same week, because Lukas Belmont does not attract attention from one direction at a time. You are a gravitational event and everything in your orbit ends up closer than it planned."
She paused, and the pause was worse than the speech because the speech was Sloane performing and the pause was Sloane deciding whether to continue performing or just say the real thing.
She said the real thing.
"I don’t care who it was." Her voice dropped half a register, and the warmth that bled through the bond turned raw. "I told you to tell me first. You didn’t. So just for that."
She held up one finger.
"I am not sneaking out tonight to get in the co-ed bath with you."
"Sloane—"
"I had plans, Lukas. I had a whole plan. I was going to steal Koda’s fluffy robe and walk over to your building at seven fifteen and change in the third floor bathroom and come downstairs to that forty-one degree pool where you’d be sitting with your arms spread on the stone like you own the place, because you always sit like you own the place, and I was going to get in and sit on your lap and put my mouth on your ear and make sounds that would ruin the acoustic environment for every single person in that bathhouse."
The image arrived fully formed and I felt my blood redirect with the urgency of a fire alarm.
"That was the plan," she continued, "and now the plan is cancelled because you have a bruise on your neck from a mouth that is not my mouth and you didn’t text me and you tried to hello my love your way out of it."
"The hello my love was genuine."
"The hello my love was strategy. I know your strategy register. It’s the same voice you used on the Channel Seven woman and I clocked it then and I’m clocking it now and it does not work on me because I have nine years of data and a supernatural bond that tells me when you’re performing."