Page 129 of Slashed Bonds

She opens her eyes.

And that’s when I see it.

The blissful, beautiful thing that rage is, when it’s honest.

“Why do I have to hide?”

Not a whisper now. A voice.

“Why do I have to pretend I don’t exist? Why don’t I get to like the good things? Want the good things? Be in the places that show I’m still here? My legs work. I’m fucked up, but I’ve got a beating fucking heart!”

Her fists twist in my hoodie.

“WHY DO I HAVE TO BE INVISIBLE WHILE THEY’RE FUCKING FREE?”

She’s gripping me like I’m the reflection of it. Like I’m the men she hates down to the marrow, standing in front of her at last, and I let her, I let her have my collar, because she needs this. She needs it out of her body and into the world, and if my hoodie is the world this morning, then that’s what it’s for.

“They get the spotlight! They get their careers! They get to be on the front line WHERE I SHOULD HAVE BEEN!”

Her voice cracks and she drives through it.

“Flaunting their perfect rich bitch. Living a life for the cameras. Living MY future! And what do I get? The fucking crumbs! A shack, because it’s all I’ve got. Never seeing my parents again. Never seeing my brother or my sister. Knowing Knox will one day have nobody, because I’ll be too fucking gone to give a damn.”

She’s screaming. In my face. From six inches. The rage at its absolute peak, her whole body shaking with it, and the frost around us has stopped mattering.

And her scent has turned.

The sweetness is gone. The cherry, the plum, the jasmine, all of it burned off like fog, and what’s left is cold. Ozone. Wet metal. The smell of the air a half second before lightning finds the ground. It’s the scent she had on the concrete outside the arena the first night, the one I catalogued and couldn’t name.

I can name it now. This is what she smells like when she stops being afraid.

“It’s not fair. It’s not fair. IT’S NOT FUCKING FAIR!”

And goodness.

I’d kill for this woman.

I understand it now. In this second, on this path, with her fists in my collar. I never understood why Killian could do what he does in the shadows, quietly, with a laptop and a patience I don’t have. I never understood why Niko would rather live in a crease than in the world, why he’d take a puck to the mask at ninety over a conversation about anything real.

And I never understood my father.

Why he wanted me on the ice. Why he built me into the captain, the leader, the one everyone in the building admires, and kept me a hundred miles from the room at the back of the house that smells of gun oil and, once, when I was fifteen and walked in without knocking, of something else.

Blood. Somebody’s. Somebody who thought the Vane name was a joke.

I see it now. Why he lets me run. Why he stopped asking about the tattoos, the sponsors I throw through doors, the money I move through lawyers for things he’d never sanction. Why he lets me be exactly as fucked up as I need to be to stay sane.

Because if he didn’t, I’d be him.

I’d kill. To protect my family. To protect the thing he’s spent his life making sure nobody takes from me, whatever I’ve become in the meantime.

Because the one thing he couldn’t protect was his daughter.

My sister.

Evie.

Two years younger. The only person in that house who ever laughed at the dinner table, and the only one who came to every game I played from the time I was nine, in the front row of whatever rink it was, with a sign she’d made that got more embarrassing every year and that I’ve kept every one of.