Page 208 of Slashed Bonds

Maddie’s hand finds my wrist and grips it. Viper doesn’t move.

A longer silence. Then a huff.

“I’ve heard about the new fucking team. They’re not making the finals. No way. They’re a bunch of fucked-up rejects. Let them have their prime time. We’ve got bigger fish to worry about when we reach the finals and playoffs.”

She giggles. Tsks.

“The bitch? Please. She’s for show. Like one of those mini trophies everyone gets for being a good fucking sport. She’s got no empire, no money. Her parents are still missing or in Russia or wherever the fuck they ran off to. I checked, and those siblings got thrown out of the safe home and they’re probably on the streets. Useless. She can’t take another pack. She’s a nobody. Useless to anyone else. Whatever those fuckers on that team see in her is use. Remember, the teams need an Omega on the roster to keep playing. They’re using her until they lose. Then she gets tossed out like the trash she is, and the rest of those Alphas aren’t serious and don’t have another Omega to replace her, so they’re done. Set for doom.”

Siblings. The safe home. Thrown out.

The photographs came in March. Two of them, through the lawyer, a girl and a boy against a wall I don’t know. She’s lying. Or she’s guessing. Or the lawyer’s photographs are seven months old and the world’s moved since.

I don’t know. I file it in the place where the things I don’t know go, and I’ll take it out tonight, and I’ll take it out with Cassian.

She laughs.

“We’re good. Now make sure my card doesn’t decline when I make this purchase. Theo and the others said they’d pay me back in cash. They’d fucking better. Lowlives are so stingy for rich kids.” A breath. “Anyway. We’ll talk soon.”

Viper’s thumb moves.

We’re already going, Maddie and I, back down the aisle fast and quiet, but Viper lingers. Half a second. Pressing another button on the recorder, and I look back and my stomach drops because the changing room latch is turning.

She’s going to get caught. She’s going to get caught with a⁠—

“This is the entire set, in the colors that surely compliment you.”

Meg.

Arriving from the other side with an armload of something black and gold, stepping directly into the changing room’s line of sight with a voice so cheery it’s a weapon. I’ve never heard Meg cheery. I don’t think Meg’s been cheery since the camera shop was her brother’s.

Naomi’s door opens a crack and stops.

I can’t deny the smirk. It’s on my face before I’ve decided. And Viper, behind Meg’s back, with Meg’s body between her and the door, is moving through the other side of the store like smoke, the recorder already gone back into her jacket.

“Whatever,” Naomi huffs, through the crack. “I’ll try it on.”

The door shuts.

Meg turns. Looks at the three of us down the aisle, the pink one and the green one coming back around the far end and the one in the middle with two bags in her hands and a face she can feel is wrong.

And Meg flicks her fingers at us.

Scram.

We scram.

Out the door into a street that smells like rain, like river, like nothing else, with the chime going behind us, and the three of us don’t say a word until we’re around the corner and against a wall of brick that’s warm from the sun that’s finally come out.

Maddie’s shaking.

Viper’s not. Viper’s got one hand flat on the inside of her jacket over the place where the recorder lives, and she’s looking at me, and she’s waiting.

I lean my head back against the brick.

I’m shaking too. I notice that. Not from the perfume. Not from the word pregnancy in a whisper or the word siblings through a door. From the other thing. The thing that’s sitting up in me now with its hands folded, patient, pleased, looking at the shape of what we’ve been handed.

“Paid off the other teams.” Maddie says it to the brick, like she’s testing whether the words hold weight outside the store. “That’s the bracket, Mori. That’s Westmere. That’s whoever’s after Westmere. If Hellsing Ross has bought their path to semis, then half the games we’re watching tape on are theater.”