Page 199 of Slashed Bonds

And Killian and Nikolai have money of their own. They’d have to. They’re as inked as he is, and ink costs, and if the rumor’s true and all of it came out of a basement that charges Alphas triple to subsidize Omegas, then three sleeves and two chest pieces and whatever’s on Killian’s back is a down payment on a house.

Me, I have a trust. Somewhere. I know that the way you know there’s a room in your house you’ve never opened. The benefactor set it up, the lawyer manages it, there’s a number in a statement that comes twice a year to a post office box, and I’ve never looked at the number. Not once.

Shame. That’s what it is. Which makes no sense, because none of it was my doing. But sense has never been the thing that decides what I’m ashamed of.

One day. One problem at a time.

Today I have a cheque with a comma in it in my own account. That’s new. I could buy what I need with my own money, for the first time since I was eighteen, and the thought has a weight to it, a dignity I’d like to hold on to.

But then again. Cassian said use the card.

I look over.

Maddie’s at the counter with her elbows on the glass, catching Meg up on two weeks of our lives at a speed no human should talk, and Meg’s listening with her chin in her hand and her eyes half-closed, which is Meg for fascinated. Viper’s drifted off to the left, through the arch, into the other half of the building.

The camera shop.

That’s the thing that makes this place what it is. Meg’s brother ran it, and then Meg ran it after he didn’t, and it’s connected through an arch in the brick, a whole second store of glass cases, tripods, lenses lined up like artillery. Because sports need capturing. Somebody has to be at the glass when a girl spins on one blade, and that somebody needs a lens that costs more than a car, and that’s a whole business of its own. Meg understood that before anyone.

Viper’s at the vintage case.

Looking down through the glass at the old film bodies with her gloved hands behind her back, not touching, the way she looks at everything she wants. Maddie’s the social-media savant, the one who can make eleven thousand people feel a hip check through a phone. But Viper is the checkmate when it comes to the image itself. Composition. Light. The thing in a photograph that makes you stop. That’s her real hobby, the thing she does when she’s not hunched over a laptop at two in the morning trying to crack some formula for a disease that she’s convinced already has a cure nobody’s selling.

Pink hair and a phone. Green hair and a lens. Black hair and a stick. We’re a strange machine. All the parts came from different wrecks and against every odd they turn.

I love how different we are. I’ll say that, here, to the smell of new foam. Three Omegas with three poisons and three skills that don’t overlap, and when I stand in a room with both of them something in my chest that’s been clenched since Bellwether lets go a notch.

Safety. Belonging. Words I’d have laughed at a month ago. I’m thankful for them, deep down where I keep things I don’t say.

I start walking.

Left side first, where the protective gear lives. I know what I need because I’ve been needing it for two weeks and writing it down. Knox, in his chewing spree, took the palm out of my left glove and the strap off my right elbow pad and did something to my shin guards I still don’t fully understand. The gear I showed up with at tryouts was five years old and held together with tape and spite. It got me through Ashford. It won’t get me through Westmere.

Shoulder pads. I pull three off the rack and hold them against me and put two back. The third’s cut low at the collarbone with a cap that sits where a check lands, black, no pink anywhere, and I keep it.

Elbow pads. Black.

A girdle. Finally. Fourteen years of hockey and I’ve never owned one that was mine.

Shin guards with a liner I can take out and wash, which matters more than anyone who hasn’t smelled a shin guard understands.

Black on black on black. Meg’s going to roll her eyes. Let her.

Skates I leave. Mine are broken in the way skates take a year to break in and I’m not starting that clock over the week before a game. But I pick up new steel for them, a profile that matches what Nikolai’s been telling me about my pivot, and a stone to keep the edge.

Tape. Six rolls, black, cloth. Wax.

I stop at the stick wall for longer than I need to. Habit. Flex is the whole argument of a stick, how much it bends before it gives the puck back, and I’ve played a seventy-five since I was sixteen because that’s what was in the bag. Too stiff for my weight. I know that. A sixty-five would load faster on a snap shot from the hash marks and give me the half beat I’ve been chasing, but a sixty-five on a slapper from the point would fold like paper, and I’m a winger, not a point, so the math says go lighter. I pull one down. Flex it against the floor with my palm on the shaft, feel where it gives.

Mid-kick. Wrong. I want it low. I want the bend down by the blade so it snaps instead of whips.

I put it back.

And then I’m walking toward the counter with my arms full, and I stop.

Because there’s a display at the end of the stick wall that I hadn’t seen from the door.

Gloves. And beside them, sticks. A brand I’ve only heard about, from a company that started with two players who got tired of wrist surgeries. The gloves have a cuff that’s split, articulated, so the wrist moves like a wrist instead of like a hinge, and a thumb that locks a different way, and the sticks are built with a kick point low enough that you release a half beat sooner without changing your hands.