Page 210 of Slashed Bonds

Badass. Also the word. Let’s examine why.

Not only because she shat in her ex’s dessert. Which she did. As one of several acts of revenge, she was careful to note, counting on her fingers, one of a sequence, and the sequence sounded planned.

The ex had been an Alpha with a restaurant and a habit. The habit was other Omegas, in the walk-in, during service, and the restaurant was the thing he loved more than any of them. So she didn’t go after the Omegas and she didn’t go after him. She went after the restaurant. A health inspector who owed her a favor. A review, anonymous, specific, about the walk-in. A supplier who stopped supplying. And then, on the night the place was dying anyway, the pie.

“He served it to his investors,” she’d said, and crossed her other leg. “Table six. I watched from the bar.”

That’s not revenge. That’s architecture. Killian should be taking notes.

He was. From the kitchen arch, with a dish towel over his shoulder, Killian had been listening to that story with the stillness he reserves for things he intends to remember.

She owns a pole fitness studio. The only Omega in the state who does, and she’s got a waiting list for the beginner class. She runs sessions at Volkov Athletic three mornings a week, on the third floor, in the wing Nikolai built for a woman he didn’t have a name for, and she told me that like it was a weather fact, and I watched Nikolai not look at me from the kitchen doorway.

And she’s a tattoo artist.

At Vicious Ink. The only Omega on the roster there. With a five-year wait list, which she also mentioned like weather.

Five years. The Alphas pay for the Omegas and the Omegas wait five years for her, and she’s sitting on my couch telling stories about pie.

Did I mention she’s best friends with Roz?

She’d looked at my arms when she came in.

Not the way people look. Not the flinch and the slide-away, the eyes finding somewhere else to be. She’d taken my left wrist in her hand without asking, turned it to the lamp, and read the blackwork over the slashes the way Killian reads a wall, finding where the lines were doing work and where they were covering, and she’d said, “Who did this?”

“A guy in a strip mall. Four years ago. Cash.”

“He was scared of you.” She’d turned the wrist again. “He went heavy where he should’ve gone light. He was hiding the scar instead of using it.” Then she let go. “Come see me. I’ve got a slot.”

Five-year wait list. And she’s got a slot.

Across the room, when she said it, Cassian had looked at her, and she’d looked back, and something had passed between them that had nothing to do with my wrist. A nod, almost. Like a thing arranged before tonight was being confirmed. I filed it with the medication conversation we still haven’t had.

I did not, because I’m still processing it. Roz Ibarra, with her reading glasses and her clipboard and her flat voice reading out sponsors like obituaries, has a best friend with a wine-red ponytail who does pole and shits in pies. How, and since when, are questions for the archives. I’ll ask Roz someday when she’s had three drinks and can’t deflect.

That’s why Valerie’s here. Dox, or Dominic, I keep hearing both and I’m not sure which he prefers, her business partner at the shop, is in the main building across the quad in a meeting with the coaches and some of the administration, people high enough up that Cassian’s jaw did a thing when he heard. Valerie had an hour. She wandered over to meet the trending team.

And within four minutes she and Maddie were finishing each other’s sentences.

Watch that. Watch her.

I’ve been watching her all evening, Maddie, not Valerie. Because this is what she does. She walks into a room full of men who’ve been told their whole lives that an Omega’s job is to be quiet, pretty, placed, and she is none of those, she’s loud, pink, unapologetic, good at eleven things, and she takes the room. Not by force. By being more alive in it than anyone else, so the gravity shifts.

Most people hate that. Most people hate an Omega who shines when she wasn’t supposed to be in the light at all.

It’s been the shape of her life. I know that much. The world’s tried, again and again, to put her back in the box she came in, a bright pink girl who needed to learn where she belonged, and every time it’s closed the lid she’s come up through the hinges. And here she is. In the Viper House lounge with a pole dancer and a defenseman and a goalie and a captain, the light the whole room’s arranged around.

I’d burn a city for her. I’d like that on record, somewhere the record keeps.

She’s telling Valerie about the clip now. The spin. How she had it cut and posted before we were off the ice, how the sound under it is the hiss of my blades and nothing else, how the stills from three angles of a captain’s mouth on a winger’s forehead did two million before breakfast. Valerie’s listening the way a professional listens to another professional, head tilted, and when Maddie finishes she says, “You framed the forehead from below. On purpose. So the glass is in it.”

Maddie’s face goes blank. Then lights. “You SAW that.”

“I see everything. Come by the shop. Bring the phone.”

Another slot. This woman hands out slots like gum.

“The promo’s next week,” Valerie says, to the room now, to all of us. “Dox wants the team in. Touch-ups, new pieces, whatever you’ve been putting off. The usual terms.”