Page 152 of Slashed Bonds

I giggle.

I giggle. In a gym. There’s a version of me five years ago who’s never once heard that sound come out of this body and would like a word.

“Probably,” I agree.

The names started in the Underground. Neither of us planned them. He called me Mommy one night as a joke, a lever, the way he uses everything, and I called him Daddy back without thinking, and we both went still, and then we both pretended we hadn’t.

It’s not a kink. Or it isn’t only one. It’s two people who lost the people those words belong to, reaching for them in the dark and finding each other instead.

I had a mother who filmed every game with her thumb over the lens. He had a father who stood in a rink corridor while a man called his son a freak. We’re not replacing anybody. We’re saying the words out loud so they don’t rust.

A quick look around. Knox was here. He was here five minutes ago, nudging my calf, and now he isn’t, which means he’s off somewhere in a three-floor building he’s never been in, investigating, and not causing a ruckus, probably, hopefully.

I shouldn’t do this.

Not here. Not in the middle of a training ring with doors on three sides and staff on two floors and anyone in the world able to walk in.

The risk is the point. It’s always been the point. I’ve had this kink since before I had anywhere to put it, and I’ve got somewhere to put it now.

And there’s something under the risk. Something that isn’t about doors or being seen. For five years every touch I’ve had has been in a room with a lock, under a mask, with a manager paid to forget. Tonight I skate in front of a building full of people who came to see whether I’m real.

I’d like, once, to do something real with the lights on first. In a room where he knows my name.

I’m on my knees before I’ve finished deciding.

And I watch his eyes follow me down. Every inch. The eye contact doesn’t break once, intense as it’s ever been, crevasse blue and locked on mine, and that’s the thrill under the thrill. Not what I’m about to do. That he’s watching me decide to do it.

My hands are at his waistband.

I’m fighting my own excitement, because I’ve missed this. Two weeks without the Underground. Nine days of a house full of walls built for horses. I’ve missed him, and I’ve missed the particular piece of him I’m about to free, and the smirk I give him when I do is seductive enough that he laughs.

“Look what Mommy always does to me.”

“Makes sense,” I murmur. “To take care of the man who’d do anything for me.” I tip my head back. “Right, Daddy? You’d do anything for me?”

“Anything for you.”

He swears it. Like an oath. Like a man saying a thing in a courtroom with his hand on something.

The last man who swore something to me did it in a parking lot with three others, having rehearsed, and then signed paperwork three weeks before he told me. I’ve learned to listen for the rehearsal. The breath before. The glance to the side to check that the others are ready.

There’s none of it. He’s looking down at me on my knees in his gym and there’s nobody else in the room to check with, and the oath came out of him like it had been sitting at the front of his mouth for two years waiting for a reason.

I believe him. God help me. On my knees, with my hands at his waistband, I believe him more than I’ve believed anything a man has said since I was nineteen.

The best part of blowing a man in a gym with three doors and the world on the other side is knowing that it doesn’t matter how careful you are—there’s always a chance someone’s going to walk in.

It’s the risk that does it for me.

The kind that hums across your skin in little pulses of lightning, even before you wrap your hand around the waistband of his shorts and feel the way his body goes taut.

That’s the thing about Nikolai Volkov: he’s got a goalie’s reflexes everywhere but here.

On the ice, he reads plays six seconds ahead, tracks pucks through traffic, and can tell you which defenseman is about to sell him out before the guy even knows it himself. In the world, he turns every room into a stage and owns it like he’s the only man who’s ever stood in the light.

But right now, he’s all reaction, all nerve ending.

Stripped of the angles, the masks, the performance, he’s just a man with his hands balled at his sides, breathing shallow and ragged because I’ve taken away every other option.