Page 174 of Slashed Bonds

That’s the point. The mouth under the mask is mine.

He leans in, but not for my mouth.

Instead, his forehead comes down and finds mine and rests there, and the towel’s still at my throat in his fist, and we’re nose to nose with my wet hair between us and his glasses, which I’m not acknowledging, pressing a line into the bridge of his nose. Neither of us moves.

That’s all.

No lips. No words. The single point of contact, bone to bone, warm, the slow pulse of him through it, and I’ve never had this. I’ve had men’s mouths and men’s hands and men’s weight, and I’ve had my father’s lips on my forehead on a bench when I was eleven and nothing since that was meant the way that was meant.

This is a different kind.

Romance, I suppose, if that’s the word, and I don’t think I’ve grasped it before now. Not the version in the books with the swelling music. The version where a man who could have you doesn’t reach, where the whole of what he wants is to put his head against yours and breathe, and the breathing’s the point.

Intimacy without the act. I didn’t know that was a thing you could have on its own.

My eyes close.

My nervous system, the one that’s been firing without a target since the water came on upstairs, finally finds the panel and switches the siren off. I feel it go. A hum under my skin cutting out, and under the hum, a stillness I remember from a pond when I was small, before anyone had put hands on me for any reason but to steady my skates.

I breathe him in. Cedar, smoke, and the sweet thing underneath.

He breathes me.

The glasses are warm now where they touch. He hasn’t taken them off.

A man who hides his eyes from an entire roster when he’s devising a plan that will ruin people’s careers has them two inches from mine, the lenses fogging at the edges from my breath.

He let me see the glasses on a hill at five in the morning, and I filed it as evidence. It wasn’t evidence. It was this.

Behind us, down the corridor, the shower’s still running, and there’s a laugh in it that’s Nikolai’s, and a lower sound that’s Killian’s answer.

Ten days.

A pack of men who choose each other.

Four men in Halbrook who think I’ll remain a shadow.

I let my forehead press harder against Cassian’s, as if I need the reassurance, as I know tonight is where shit hits the fan and reality strikes.

Tonight, we skate out together for the first time, under lights, in a building full of people who’ve decided our team is going to be the grand circus on ice in this arena that builds hockey champions.

They’ll be forced to acknowledge a comeback no one dared think would transpire…

CHAPTER 23

Leave No Crumbs

~MORRIGAN~

“HEADING ONTO THE ICE is what some may call the rejects of hockey! Introducing… the BLACKRIDGE VIPERS!”

It’s the dumbest introduction I’ve ever heard.

Who wrote that? Who approved it? Who stood in a booth at Ashford and read it into a microphone with a straight face?

And it works.

That’s the part I can’t get my head around as the tunnel opens in front of us and the sound hits. It works. Whatever appeal has been brewing in this crowd, whatever juju Maddie poured into a phone over the last three days while I wasn’t tracking it, this is the register it wanted. Rejects. Said proud. Said like a brand.