Page 205 of Slashed Bonds

A head tilt. Honey and wire.

“I almost thought I’d seen a ghost. But with such a familiar face trending all over my feed, like something that should’ve stayed in the trash where it was put…” The grin widens. “It’s intriguing to find you can even afford to be in a space like this.”

I say nothing.

My face is neutral. The boardroom face. I learned it at eighteen from the other side of a table and I perfected it in a facility and I could hold it through an earthquake.

She leans in.

“So what is this spree of yours? A redemption arc? Payback?” A laugh, light, cruel. “When it’s so obvious you have nothing to prove, and nothing to prove it with. If you think a moment of viral fame is going to erase the fact that you’re a broken druggie who doesn’t work anymore, it won’t.”

Nothing. I give her nothing.

And she smirks, because silence has never once in her life been a thing she respected, and she comes in closer, until her perfume is a wall I’m standing inside, and she puts her mouth by my ear.

“And that whole pregnancy test in the drawer?” A whisper. Delighted. “Iconic. Trying to baby-trap a bunch of good men with wonderful futures ahead of them is so typical for an Omega desperate to be relevant.”

I stay completely still.

She knew. She knew about the test. She knew when she stood at that window.

The drawer. Top left, in the bathroom I shared with four men, under the spare toothbrushes. Two lines on a stick I’d bought at a pharmacy two towns over because I couldn’t buy it in Halbrook without it being on Theo’s phone by dinner. I’d looked at it for an hour. I’d put my hand on my stomach, flat, nothing there yet, and I’d let myself have one thing, one picture, a small hand around my finger on a bench at a rink.

I never told them. I was going to, after the final. I thought the final would make it a celebration instead of a problem.

And she went through my drawer. Before the boardroom. She knew what she was pushing.

The hospital said eight weeks. They said it to a chart, not to me, and I heard it through a curtain, and then they said other things about my neck and my blood that drowned it, and nobody ever said it to my face. Nobody’s ever said it to my face until now, in a whisper, in a hockey store, as a punchline.

There’s a thing in the back of my mind. A mechanism, a bolt, and it wants to slide home so badly I can feel the pressure of it behind my eyes, the Switch leaning on the door with her whole weight asking to be let through. I don’t let her. Not yet. I hold the door with my shoulder and I breathe honey and wire.

“A birdy at the hospital told me you can’t have kids anymore, though.” Still whispering. “Do those misfit fuckers, who I assume are your dealers, know how pitiful of an Omega you are? Do they know what they bought?”

“This stupid-ass fucking BITC⁠—“

Maddie.

Lunging. Pink nails out, and Viper has her, one arm across her chest, hauling her back a step while Maddie goes on cussing in a register I didn’t know she had, a string of things about Naomi’s mother and her hair and her future, and Viper holds her like a woman holding a dog back from a road, not looking at Maddie at all.

Looking at me.

I don’t move.

Naomi and I are sharing a look. Her eyes, pale blue, pupils gone small in the store light, satisfied, waiting for me to break or cry or swing.

I sigh.

“You’re right.”

I say it plain. No heat. The way you confirm a weather report.

“Can’t carry shit.”

She blinks.

“I mean, I’m carrying all the trauma a woman could possibly need. Hands full.” I tilt my head the way she did. “Why would I want to be a mother? Why would I bring a child into a world where a woman with money can plot the downfall of one who worked blood, sweat, and tears for a future on the ice the old-fashioned way, only to be set up. Revoked. Shunned. And thrown off a building by a perpetrator who knew she was carrying a child.”

Naomi’s smile falters. A quarter inch.