Page 103 of Slashed Bonds

I groan.

Pinch the bridge of my nose.

Which is a Cash gesture and I’m annoyed to have picked it up in under a week.

Because she’s right.

Nikolai was going to lose it. He’d come down the stairs in gray sweats and nothing else, hair in his eyes, to see what the noise was, and one of the second-pair defensemen, a kid named Marchetti who’d been quiet all week, had looked at me across the front hall.

Not at Maddie.

At me.

With the specific expression of a man who’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed and was still sore about being beaten on the track by an Omega and had decided this was the moment to make it a challenge.

Petty. That’s all it was. A sore loser looking for a scrap.

He’d lost to me on the track Thursday. Straight sprint, a hundred meters, Nikolai’s idea, and I’d beaten him by a body length and hadn’t celebrated, which I’ve since learned is worse.

Then he’d lost a draw to me Friday, clean, in front of the whole roster, and I’d skated away without looking at him, which is the highest compliment a center can pay and which he’d taken as a slap.

So he looked. Chin up. Mouth flat.

The look a man gives when he’s decided you’re a problem he’s going to solve in a corner with nobody watching.

I’ve been given that look by better men. I know exactly what it costs.

Nikolai saw it from the stairs and the temperature in the front hall dropped ten degrees. I felt it. Maddie felt it, and she’d been in the building forty seconds.

Marchetti was lucky.

That’s the truth.

He was lucky the captain got between them, and even luckier Killian arrived behind the captain like a second door closing. I said his name in the voice from Bellwether before anything got to the point where an arm was involved, thank the heavens for that.

One word. His name.

In the register that isn’t a request.

And Marchetti looked at me, and looked at the goaltender coming down the stairs with his shoulders up, and did the arithmetic every sore loser eventually does, and found something to look at on the floor.

Then Cash said his sentence, and the ground floor emptied.

Maddie watched all of it with her suitcase handle in one hand and her phone already up in the other. She’s got footage.

She hasn’t shown me that either.

I can tell she’s going to be the Queen of social media here in the Viper House. Which could be a good thing, or a bad thing.

Does it matter?

It’s not like we were trying to obtain good exposure anyways.

We already have one broken arm and a game on Tuesday. Let’s not kill each other before the first puck drops, yes?

“We should bring Viper here,” Maddie says.

Both eyebrows up. Inviting.