Page 198 of Slashed Bonds

Anything You Desire

~MORRIGAN~

“THE HOLY TRINITY OF REJECTED EPICNESS HAS ARRIVED!”

“Bitch, shut the fuck up.”

Meg’s groan comes from behind the counter before the door’s finished closing behind us, and Maddie loses it. Doubles over on the welcome mat in her pink corduroy, laughing so hard she has to hold the doorframe, and then she’s skipping. Skipping across a hockey store toward a woman who looks like we’ve handed her a migraine in a gift bag.

Meg. Still here. Still pinching the bridge of her nose like that. Some things hold.

She’s the woman in this city with the best equipment for Omegas. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact anyone who’s played will tell you. The chains carry one rack of Omega gear, shoved in a corner behind the youth sizes, all of it pink or lilac or that particular purple that says we didn’t think about this at all. Meg carries everything. Shoulder pads cut for a frame with hips. Skates in widths that exist. Sticks with a flex that makes sense for a woman who isn’t six-two and two-twenty.

And she’s been doing it in a brick building off the river for twenty years with a face like she’d rather be anywhere else.

I stand on the mat.

The door shuts behind Viper, who comes in last and stops beside me with her hands in her jacket pockets, and the sound of the street cuts off, and the smell hits.

New material. God.

There’s nothing like it. Fresh nylon and the chemical sweetness of unworn foam, leather that hasn’t met sweat yet, the sharp clean bite of blade steel in its wax. Rubber from the sticks on the far wall. Tape, the cloth kind, in stacks, giving off that faint adhesive note you only notice when there are a hundred rolls of it in one place. I close my eyes and breathe it in and I’m fourteen, with my father’s hand on my shoulder, standing in this exact spot while he argued with Meg about a skate boot.

Nostalgia. That’s the word. It comes up odd, warm, and I let it.

Then I open my eyes and look around, and the other thing comes up behind it.

The last time. Not with Dad. The last time.

Eighteen. Three weeks before Halbrook. I’d come in alone and walked these aisles with a list in my head, and there’d been four things on the list. A stick with a lower kick point, because mine was wrong for my release. Gloves with a shorter cuff for wrist mobility. A proper girdle instead of the hand-me-down pants I’d been wearing since sixteen. A visor that didn’t fog.

I couldn’t afford two of them. That was true. A scholarship covers ice and not much else.

And the other two I could’ve afforded, and didn’t buy, because I needed my pack’s permission to finalize a purchase over a hundred dollars. That was the arrangement. Pack finances, Theo called it. We’re a unit. We decide together.

We. The unanimous vote of four men on whether their Omega got gloves that fit.

They said no. All four. Not necessary, Theo said, with his arm around my shoulders in the kitchen, kind about it, reasonable about it, the way he was reasonable about everything right up until the boardroom. Wait till we reach semis at least, Mori. Then we’ll kit you out properly. You don’t need new gloves to beat Westmere.

I didn’t need new gloves to beat Westmere. I needed them to beat the thing they’d already planned.

Because it was all a setup. Every piece. Three weeks later I was on a windowsill, and the gloves with the short cuff were still on the wall in Meg’s store, and I’ve thought about them, in the shed, in the dark, more than a sane woman should think about gloves.

And now there’s a card in my pocket.

A Black Amex. From a team captain who put it in a stranger’s hand and said buy whatever she wants and I can afford it like he was describing the weather.

Funny. That’s the word my mouth wants. The whole arc of it. Four men who held a vote over a hundred dollars, and one who hasn’t asked me the price of anything since the day he met me.

It makes me realize something I’ve been not-realizing on purpose.

I don’t know much about their families.

Any of the three. Where the money comes from, where they grew up, who’s alive and who isn’t. I know Cassian’s sister’s dead and his father’s a man with gun oil in his office. I know Nikolai’s mother made him promise the ice from a hospital bed. I know Killian’s house had two languages in it that weren’t safe. Fragments. The kind of things people tell you at three in the morning when the wall’s thin.

I don’t feel the urge to dig. That’s the strange part. The Switch would dig. The Switch would have the Vane family’s tax filings by now. But the rest of me is content to let it come when it comes.

Still. A Black Amex. Cassian’s in the rich department. That’s not a guess, that’s arithmetic.