Page 122 of Slashed Bonds

I sigh.

My head goes lower, and my eyes, half open, land on my own stomach.

The abs. The muscle. A body I rebuilt from a loading dock up, one rep at a time, in a shed in a forest with nobody watching.

And the dream comes back.

I’d forgotten it. It was there when I woke, and it went under the dread, and now it surfaces the way things surface in cold water.

A hand.

A small one. Fingers the size of matchsticks, closing around one of mine. A sound, the kind that only comes out of something that hasn’t yet learned what the world is. A giggle. And me, in a room with no walls, surrounded by shapes I couldn’t see the faces of, shadows in the shape of men, and in my arms a weight that was warm, heavy, and looked up at me like I was the whole of everything.

Like I was their world.

My vision goes before I can stop it.

The tears come. No warning, no build, the way they did in the mirror at Halbrook, my face not catching up to my eyes. They run down and drop off my jaw onto the frost and I stand there holding a tree and let them, because I’ve learned that fighting it costs more than it’s worth.

I can’t have kids.

That’s what I’m standing with. Nobody’s said it to me in those words. They’ve said things like the site is compromised and we can’t predict what a second bond would do and the scarring is extensive. They’ve said the compound Naomi gave me was designed to make sure, and that it did its job.

Nobody’s said the sentence. I’ve said it, in the dark, to a dog.

No pack. No kids. No future in the shape I was promised.

There’ll be a day. I know there will. When the season’s over, or the next one, or whenever the entertainment runs out, and I’m alone again.

Parents nonexistent. My mother a word on a form. My father a thing I still don’t let myself finish thinking.

Wren and Corbin eons away, in a house I’m not allowed to know the address of, growing up under a name that isn’t ours, for their protection, and I’ll get a photograph twice a year through a lawyer and the photograph will have been taken by someone I’ve never met.

And Knox.

Knox is six. Knox is a big dog. Big dogs go over that rainbow road at ten, at twelve if you’re lucky, and I’m not lucky, and I can’t…

He’s got a gray hair on his muzzle. One. I found it Thursday, under his chin, while he was asleep on Nikolai’s ankle, and I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at it for a long time and didn’t touch it.

One gray hair. That’s a clock. I’ve got a clock on the only thing that chose me.

I lift my head.

I flick the tears off my face with the backs of my fingers, hard, like I’m angry at them for surfacing. Which I am.

“Thinking is stupid,” I mutter.

To the tree. To the dark. To nobody.

I’m trying not to cry more. Trying not to wallow in this weight that comes and sits on me at five in the morning like a dog on a chest, and I hate it, I hate it. I hate that no matter how hard I train, how many hours I skate, how many reps I do in a shed with the door locked, I can’t get this stain out.

And here’s what hurts underneath all of it.

I didn’t deserve this.

I didn’t earn it. I worked. I worked so hard for everything in my life that coaches had to tell me to stop. Every opportunity. Every chance. Every draw I won and every shift I took and every time I got up before my shoulder stopped screaming because Dorian taught me to.

All for what?