Page 182 of Slashed Bonds

He’s always known where the load goes. Even now. Even with that face on him.

I push off the boards.

My ribs don’t love it. I don’t care. I’m skating, past the D-man who hit me and doesn’t look at me, through the slush, toward a pile of black jerseys at the far end with a woman at the bottom of it, and I hit the pile and the pile takes me in.

We’re not cheering.

That’s the thing nobody expects. Twenty-two men around one Omega and nobody’s yelling. We hiss. All of us, together, a sound that starts low in Killian and gets picked up by the twins and spreads, teeth bared, the sound of the thing on our masks, and it comes up out of the pile and goes out across the ice.

Like fucking Vipers.

The crowd finds its voice.

Not a cheer. Something past a cheer. Manic. The building losing whatever mind it had left, ten thousand people on their feet making a noise that has no shape, and the shutters are going along the glass like gunfire, and the siren finally goes, late, because the man at the horn forgot his job watching her spin.

It’s a blur.

I’d like to tell it better than that. I’m the one who sees the sheet laid out, who knows where every body’s going to be, and I can’t tell you where anybody was in that pile or how long it lasted or what was said. It’s a high. The highest I’ve ever been without a chemical, sound, light, bodies, the smell of twenty men and one woman all at once, and I don’t know how to comprehend it so I stop trying.

I know this. The rest of them pull back.

They give her room. Slowly, the twins first, the way men give room when they understand they’re not the story, and when the pile comes apart there are four of us left in the middle of it. Killian still with an arm around her. Niko arrived at last, pads and all, breathing like he’s the one who skated the length. And me.

Our Monarch in the middle of us. Where she belongs.

She pulls her helmet off.

And the shutters go insane.

Because there it is. The hair coming down black and red, soaked through. The lip ring. And the mouth, dark red, the lipstick she put on in a locker-room bathroom under a glowing mask where nobody could see, now on every camera in the building, smeared at the corner from the cage, the one piece of this night she did for herself.

We pull ours too. Three helmets off, three mouth guards still in, and we’re on her, all of us, arms, jerseys, the smell of her coming up through the sweat, and I see her face tip up toward mine.

Relief.

That’s what’s in her eyes. Under the triumph. A thing I don’t think she knows is showing, the look of a woman who’s been holding a breath for five years and has let it out in front of ten thousand people and is waiting to see if the world ends.

It doesn’t.

I move my mouth guard with my tongue. Lean in.

And I press my mouth to her forehead.

That’s going to trend. Maddie’s going to have it posted before we’re off the ice. There’s a committee liaison behind the glass writing it down.

I don’t stop myself. It’s too late to stop. The second my mouth touched her skin there was a camera on it, and you can’t take a thing like that back, so you don’t try. You lean into it. Think of it as a public tease. A down payment on a thing the whole world’s going to find out about anyway.

I pull back an inch. Her eyes are on mine, wet, lit.

“Now that’s our Omega.” I say it loud enough for the three of us and nobody else. “Running the fucking show.”

She beams.

There’s no other word. Her whole face goes bright with it, the praise landing somewhere that’s been empty a long time and filling it, the adrenaline still spiking in her so her cheeks are flushed and her breath’s coming short and her eyes won’t stop moving over the three of us like she’s checking we’re real.

Somebody get that. Somebody in this building with a camera, catch that. Video, stills, all of it. Because I’ve known this woman five days and I’ve seen her switched, scared, sick, spitting blood, and I have never seen her look like this.

Alive.