Page 17 of Slashed Bonds

Nothing here makes me docile. That’s the myth. People hear medicated and picture a woman who’s been turned down like a dimmer switch.

It gives me equilibrium.

Equilibrium is what lets me stay in control, and control is the only thing they didn’t manage to take.

I dry my hair, dress, and sit down at the milk crate I use as a vanity.

The eyeliner goes on heavy and gets smudged out with my thumb until it reads more bruise than makeup. Silver in both ears, up the cartilage, through my eyebrow, through my lip. Rings on seven fingers. Chains stacked at my throat over the moth.

By the time I stand up, I sound like a wind chime with intent.

Then the lipstick.

I have a language for that tube, and I’ve never explained it to another person. Dark plum means I’m functioning. Blackened burgundy means I’m running on four hours of sleep and a grudge. Clear gloss means I had enough in the tank for one step and that step wasn’t this one.

Tonight I skip past all of it and pick up the red.

True red is for hockey.

It goes on like war paint, which is what it is, and the woman looking back at me from the mirror stops looking like somebody who spent the morning on a bathroom floor.

“There she is,” I murmur.

Knox is already at the door with his leash in his mouth and his ruined stick toy pinned under one paw, torn between the two, mortally offended that he can’t bring both.

The truck is fifteen years old, the color of a bruise, and starts on the second try, which I choose to read as an omen. It was left at this property with the keys in the driver seat. Guess the person who blessed me with this oasis of safety wanted me to have transportation.

For a 15-year-old motor, she runs well. Get her checked once a year to make sure I don’t ruin her.

Hollow Creek Arena squats at the end of a service road on the far side of the county line, and calling it an arena is generous to the point of fraud. It’s a converted dairy barn with a single sheet of ice inside it, boards patched with plywood, and a scoreboard that gave up on the third period in 2009 and stayed there.

The lot is packed by ten to eight.

Trucks, mostly. A few bikes. Men leaning against tailgates in the cold with their breath going up in clouds, passing a bottle nobody bothers to hide.

Sully meets me at the door with his clipboard and his terrible hat.

“Malice.” He says it the way other people say, ma’am. “You look upright.”

“Barely.”

“Barely’s the whole product.” He scratches Knox behind the ear and gets a look for his trouble. “Sixty-forty. Two twenties on the line tonight, so your end’s worth showing up for. You’re skating with Ruiz and the Tremblay kid.”

“Against?”

He grimaces. “Kessler brought his boys down from the mill league.”

Alphas, then.

“How many?”

“Four on the roster.” He clears his throat. “They’ve been drinking since five.”

“Cool,” I say. “Love a level playing field.”

Inside, the barn smells the way these places always smell. Cold rubber matting.

Ammonia leaking off a compressor that should have been replaced when I was in elementary school. Burnt coffee, old popcorn oil, wet wool, and underneath it the sweet mineral bite of fresh-cut ice.