Page 133 of Slashed Bonds

“Film session. My room. She’s reviewing Ashford’s breakout with me and I need her head clear for it, not on a sheet.” A pause. “Halloran, I’ve never once asked you for a morning. I’m asking.”

Then, lower, to someone else, Killian or Niko, I couldn’t tell: “Not now. Tonight. I’ll tell you tonight.”

He lied to a head coach for me. Then he told his pack he’d explain. In that order.

I’m going to have to think about that too.

He’s shirtless.

Which is hot, I’ll admit that in the privacy of my own skull. Every piece of silver still in, ears, brow, lip, the long hair out of its tie and wet, pushed back off his face and dripping onto his shoulders, because he carried me into this bathroom and started the water and didn’t bother to step out of range.

Ink down both arms. The serpent along the right hand. Something on his chest I can’t read from here, over the heart, in script.

When he sits down in front of the bath later, I’ll be able to read it. One word. A name. Four letters, in a hand that isn’t the artist’s, that looks copied from something handwritten, a signature on a birthday card or the bottom of a sign.

I won’t ask. He won’t offer. That’s the manners again.

And the scar on his throat, pale and raised, which I keep looking at and he keeps letting me.

I don’t know why he found me.

That’s the thing I can’t put down. Why he followed. How he knew I’d come apart on a path at a specific tree at a specific minute. I’ve been turning it over since the headphones went on, and I can’t get it to lie flat.

It’s like the thing they say. A knight in shining armor, out of nowhere, saving the day.

Except my knight is tattooed, pierced, listens to music that sounds like a building collapsing, and I’d bet he could fight.

And there’s a calm to him. A dangerous one.

That’s probably why I still feel uneasy, under the hot water and the bubbles and the silence. Like I’m missing something. Like there’s a piece of the floor plan I haven’t been shown.

Or maybe it’s that he’s more perceptive than I’d credit a man whose job is to run a team of rejected Alphas and do it well. Because he does do it well. I’ve watched him for six days. He holds a fort full of psychos with a look and a sentence, and nobody argues, and nobody dies.

There has to be something wrong with him. Something fucked up, structurally, in the places you can’t see.

I’ve been collecting evidence. Six days of it.

He does rounds at night. I’ve heard him. A door opening two inches down the hall and closing again, every night, at two and at four, like a man checking locks in a house that’s never been broken into.

He wears glasses he hides from the roster. He keeps a room clean for four years for nobody. He throws a sponsor through a door for a sentence about a goaltender’s skin and then signs the incident report in the morning without arguing.

He reads lips. He reads walls. He read a tournament photo five years old, I’d bet money on it, and he’s never once said so.

None of that’s a flaw. That’s the problem. I’ve been looking for a crack and all I keep finding is load-bearing wall.

And look at me. One more psycho for the list. Lucky him.

“You’re loving it,” he says. “Don’t lie.”

I pout.

The repetitive expression. The one I didn’t do for five years and have done six times in a week. Because he’s right. The bath is working. My muscles were locking up by the time we got to the service road, calves, hamstrings, the long muscles in my back going to stone one at a time, and he’d had to stop, and crouch, and say get on in a voice that didn’t invite discussion.

Piggyback. A hundred and forty pounds of soaking wet Omega on the captain’s back up two flights of stairs.

Thank god everyone was asleep. Nobody saw. The humiliation stayed between the two of us.

But he saw.