Page 173 of Slashed Bonds

Gray. Thick. Folded.

Three of them stacked back there, which means he brought them, which means he knew.

He knew we’d come out of that shower to a room with no towels. He knew which shower. He knew when.

I don’t ask how.

I’ve stopped asking how with this one. It’s Cassian’s particular gift.

Not reading scent; Nikolai does that. Not reading structure; that’s Killian’s.

Cassian reads where everyone is and where they’re about to be, the way he reads a faceoff dot a half second before the puck drops, and the whole house moves around that reading without noticing it’s being moved.

A captain’s trick?

Or something older than the captaincy, a thing he learned at seventeen when a sister stopped being where she was supposed to be, and he’s never let anyone slip his count.

He opens the towel and puts it around me.

Not at me. Around.

Over my shoulders first, bringing it closed at my throat, and then down, both hands working the water out of my hair through the cotton with a patience I don’t have anywhere in my body, and the towel is dry, soft, warm from wherever he’s been keeping it.

I’m drawn in against his chest as he does it.

His scent.

I’ve had it through a broken filter on a loading dock and through a hoodie on a hill at five in the morning and I thought I knew it. I didn’t. This close, with my face at his collarbone and his arms around me working the towel, it’s a different animal. Cedar’s the first note, the one everybody gets. Under it something darker. Smoke, maybe, from a fire that burned a long time ago and never fully went out. And under that, so faint I have to stop breathing to find it, something sweet.

Something that doesn’t belong on a man who breaks arms.

My eyes are on his.

They’ve been on his since I sat down.

Through the towel and the hair and the scent and the slow, steady work of his hands, and he hasn’t looked away either, and neither of us has blinked as much as a person should.

Something in my chest goes slack.

Not a collapse. A loosening.

The way a knot gives when you’ve finally found the right end to pull, and I feel my shoulders drop a quarter inch under the towel and I didn’t tell them to.

Tonight.

The word arrives on its own, the way they do.

Tonight there’s a tunnel at Ashford.

I’ve skated one tunnel in the last five years, and it led to a parking lot at Hollow Creek where men bet on whether the Omega would last the period. This one leads to a sheet with my number on it under a Blackridge banner, with a Beta in the far net who’ll give me the top of the frame if I shoot early, before the ice at his end goes soft.

A sophomore defenseman on the left who steps up like he’s late for something. A winger named Halvard who wants the outside and is going to get a wall instead, from a woman who learned it this morning in red gloves.

The neck-brace kid’s father in the stands. A board member. Watching the man who put his son in a brace stand on his blue line beside a girl the papers never got a name for.

And a crowd that’s going to say Omega like a diagnosis.

There’s a red lipstick in my jacket pocket downstairs. The game-day one. I’ve put it on before every money game for a year, a ritual nobody’s seen the end of, and tonight it goes on under a black matte mask with a violet viper slashed across the mouth, where nobody will see it at all.