Page 156 of Slashed Bonds

Both. Neither. I’m in a ring full of water with a man I’ve known in daylight for nine days. Diagnose it later.

Nikolai makes a sound. Not a word. A low vibration in the throat, the one that means a conversation’s over.

“Yes, sir!”

Both of them. In unison. The way the twins say things, the way men say things when a sound has gone through a room and reorganized it. Gone in a flash, back down the corridor at a pace that suggests they’d like to be anywhere else, and the alarm cuts off thirty seconds later, and the sprinklers run another ten and then stop.

Silence. Dripping.

The ring’s a pond. The bags on the floor have gone from sand to concrete. Somewhere in the building a drain is working hard, and I can hear it, and I can hear my own heart, and I can hear Nikolai breathing under the dog.

This is the best morning I’ve had in five years. I’d like that noted somewhere it can’t be revised.

He’s sitting on Nikolai’s chest with his tongue out and water running off his ears, and he looks at me, and the brown eye with the X through it has an expression in it I’ve seen on exactly one other face this morning.

Triumph. Both of them. The dog and the goaltender. They’ve decided they’re a unit and nobody consulted me.

I look down at Knox.

“Good job, Knox.”

“Woof!”

A cheer. Triumphant. Tail going, chin up, every inch of him certain he’s done something excellent.

“I need praise too,” Nikolai whines, from under the dog.

I snicker. Shake my head, water flying off the ends of my hair.

“Unless it’s between my legs, fuck no.”

And I mean the training. That’s the thing he doesn’t know yet. I didn’t come here to hit a bag the way a woman hits a bag to feel better. I came because there’s a sophomore defenseman on Ashford who pinches, and a winger named Halvard who wants the outside, and a man in my past who taught me to take a hit at eleven on a frozen pond and I’d like to learn to give one from somebody who isn’t him.

A check is a punch with skates on. The hips do the work, the shoulder’s a passenger, and the thing you’re hitting is never the man. It’s the spot he’ll be in a half second from now.

I put Teller on his back with that principle nine days ago and I did it on instinct, from a pond at eleven, and instinct is a thing that fails under lights. I want it in my hands as a skill. I want to be able to do it tired, in the third period, in a building that’s screaming, against a man who’s been told I’m the soft one on the roster.

Tonight somebody on Ashford is going to test the Omega. I’d like to have an answer that isn’t luck.

Nikolai knows that. He’s stood in a crease for four years watching men learn it the hard way.

“That can be arranged,” he hums. “But I need to get you sweaty first.”

I grin. Taunting. I reach up and gather my soaked hair in both hands and start twisting it into a knot, and I watch him watch me do it from the floor.

“Well,” I say. “I came for a training session.”

I narrow my eyes at him.

“So train me, Daddy.”

CHAPTER 21

Pinky Swear

~NIKOLAI~

Morning cardio is a whole lot better with a menace of a baddie taking you down like she’s unlocked the black-belt credentials.