Page 214 of Slashed Bonds

The twins. In unison. Still holding a goalie.

The room’s gone. Everyone. Dubois on the floor, Greenie beside him, Maddie weeping into Valerie’s shoulder and Valerie hollering over her head, and even Viper, in the armchair, has let the black mouth go to a smirk and left it there.

This. This is what the sound of a house is. I didn’t know. I grew up with four people and I never knew it sounded like this.

I’m laughing too. I notice it late, the way I’ve been noticing everything late this month, the ache under my ribs and the tears at the corners of my eyes and my hand still on Nikolai’s shoulder where he’s stopped pulling against the twins and is looking down at me with the whole of his face gone soft.

“I’m glad you lot are having a time.”

Roz.

From the hall door. Not the arch. The other door, the one to the front of the house, and the sound of her voice is the sound of a woman who’s this second come in from outside and hasn’t taken her coat off.

We turn.

All of us. The laughing dies in stages, back to front, the twins letting go of Nikolai, Dubois sitting up, Maddie lifting her face out of Valerie’s shoulder with her mascara gone.

Roz is in the doorway. Coat on. Reading glasses pushed up into her hair. And behind her, Halloran, with his hands in his jacket pockets and his face the color of the fireplace stone.

And a third man.

Older. Sixty, gray at the temples, standing one step behind the two of them with his hat in his hands. In a uniform. Not a team one. Dark, pressed, with a badge on the chest and a patch on the shoulder I don’t recognize, a crest, something municipal or county, the kind of uniform you see at a door and feel your stomach drop before your brain’s read the patch.

Police. Some kind. A kind that comes to a house at night with his hat in his hands.

Knox has stopped chewing.

And a line comes up out of the dark where I keep it.

White paper, warm from a fire, held down by a rock.

Should we hurt those fuckers next?

I’d read it as a threat. A thing to be handled, the way Cassian handles things, with lawyers and tape and time. I hadn’t read it as a schedule. My hand’s gone tight on Nikolai’s shoulder and I can’t make it let go, and I’m counting the room the way I count exits. Cassian. Killian. Nikolai. The twins. Greenie. Dubois. Okonkwo. Pruitt on the stairs. Marchetti, who went up an hour ago.

Who’s not here. Who isn’t in this room.

“But I need your attention for a moment.”

Roz’s voice is wrong. Flat in the usual way and under the flat, something else. Something I’ve heard in a hospital corridor at two in the morning.

Nobody moves.

I can feel Nikolai’s shoulder under my hand go to stone. I can feel Cassian, across the room, go still the way he goes still when he’s read the whole sheet and doesn’t like it. Killian’s eyes have gone to the uniform and stayed there, reading the patch, the badge, the hat.

Halloran sighs.

A long breath out through his nose. He steps forward, past Roz, into the room, into the light of the fire, and he looks at us the way a man looks at a room he’s about to change.

“One of your teammates is dead.”

CHAPTER 31

All You Need Is An Ink Gun

~KILLIAN~

“Smoking when your coach has finished telling a room full of kids that overdoses are on the rise is a wild test of fate.”