Page 136 of Slashed Bonds

Here’s what it’s like, from in here.

Everything’s quiet. Not the good silence, the hockey silence. A colder one, with corners. The room has edges I can count, and the man on the floor has a pulse I can see at his throat, and the distance from my hand to that pulse is a number.

Mori’s in the back. I can feel her, the way you feel someone asleep in the next room. She came apart on a path and I came up to hold the pieces, and I’ll hold them until she’s ready, because that’s the deal, that’s always been the deal.

She feels. I calculate. Between us, we’ve survived five years nobody expected either of us to.

And the man on the floor is talking to me. Not around me. Not through me to get to her. He’s looked at the thing most people in a ward would call a symptom and he’s said good morning to it.

Maddie. He said Maddie. Which means he’s talked to her, or watched her, or done the thing he does with walls and read through one, and understood that the pink girl in the lounge has a sense for which version of me walks into a room.

Four days. He’s had Maddie in the building four days and he’s already got her filed as an instrument.

“You want to sound like some smart jackass.”

He doesn’t reply.

I turn in the water and fold my arms along the edge of the tub, and I put my chin on my wet forearms, and water goes over the lip and onto the tile and neither of us looks at it.

Our eyes are locked.

I’m looking for the flaw. There’s always a flaw. In every beautiful thing, in every man who ever looked at me like this, there’s a crack, and I’ve learned to find cracks before they find me.

He’s a beautiful creature. I’ll say that in the privacy of my skull too. And he’s cracked the code of me like a puzzle he’s been begging to solve, like it was easy, like it cost him nothing.

I hate that.

Maybe I hate him.

Or…truth be told…it’s the opposite, and isn’t that the most frightening thing of all, when you’ve been broken by love once and you think you’ve found your match?

“You can’t save us.”

“And who said you needed saving?”

That stops me.

I look at him, and I know my face has gone confused, and I let it.

“I don’t save, Malice. I lead.”

He stands.

I expect him to leave. That’s what people do at this point in the conversation. They stand, and they go, and the door closes, and the water goes cold.

He comes to the bath.

Sits on the floor in front of it. Right in front of me, close enough that his scent arrives in a wave, bergamot and burnt coffee and charred cedar, and under it the amber, warm, wrapping around me in the steam like an invisible cocoon.

Safe. I’ll accept that word. Protected. I’ll accept that one too, and hate myself for it later.

And while he’s talking, the thing in the back of my head that lives in the same room as hockey starts drawing.

Pillars. Walls. He’s not speaking in riddles. He’s speaking in a system, and I’ve been running it for a week.

The 1-3-1. Him at the top, reading the breakout before it happens. Three across the middle, and the middle is where the puck has to go, and the middle is where nothing gets through. Killian on the near side, standing in the lane before anyone’s decided to use it. Niko at the back, in the net, the last wall, the one who’s already moved before you’ve finished choosing where to shoot.

And me on the left wall. Waiting.