Page 219 of Slashed Bonds

“So I can get beaten and potentially killed?” He pushes off the rail. “No thanks.”

I smirk at that.

He turns away. Takes my cigarette with him, pinched between two inked fingers, and holds it up over his shoulder without looking back.

“You don’t need this. Do you.”

Below us, under the second light, she laughs.

I look down. She’s hugging Vix, both arms, which is a thing I’ve seen her do with exactly two people before tonight. Then she’s waving at Maddie and Viper as they peel off toward the gate, pink and green going into the dark together. They all look troubled. The cruisers are still there and a boy with a cereal bowl is in a van with the county crest on it. But they’re trying, the four of them, to lift each other an inch, and I can see it working from here.

She laughed. With a dead kid in the quad and four men in Halbrook who’d like her in a box. She laughed, and I heard it from a balcony, and I don’t want a cigarette.

“Nah,” I say. “I don’t need it.”

He’s walking.

Three strides toward the stair, and he pauses mid-step, the way he does when a thought’s caught up to him that he’d meant to leave behind.

“Bring your girl to Vicious.” Over his shoulder. “I know she’s on a healing path. Lessard’s got her on the taper and the new regimen, and that’s good work, but it’s slow, and it’s only touching the chemistry.” A pause. “If you want to play around with fixing what those fuckers did to her, I’ll have Valerie bend some strings and slot her in for a piece.”

I blink.

Slowly. And I look at his back, and the question comes up through me from somewhere under the root and the calm, from the place that’s been quiet since the dosage came down and isn’t quiet now.

“Can you lot reverse that shit?”

The scar where the receptor was. The thing in her blood that burned the rest. Caesura. Six weeks to clear, permanent after. Every doctor who’s ever looked at her chart has said the same word.

He’s walking again. Down the first step, the second, and I don’t expect an answer, because Dox doesn’t answer questions he hasn’t decided to answer.

But the wind’s coming up the stairwell from the quad, and it carries his voice back to me on the drift of it, low, almost pleased.

“Pull the right strings and we can cure whatever the fuck you need. All you need is an ink gun, my friend.”

CHAPTER 32

A Cemetery

~MORRIGAN~

Three wins.

I say it to the ceiling of my room, lying on my back on the green lounge with my feet on the arm and a tape I’m not watching paused on the iPad against my stomach. Three games, three wins, and the bracket on the kitchen wall that Killian drew in marker on butcher paper has a line running through it now toward a box that says SEMIS in his square capitals.

Semifinals. Rejects. Four weeks after a crowd came to laugh.

It’s enlightening, in an odd way. Like finding out a door you’d walked past for five years was never locked.

The sponsors have noticed. Roz has a second list now, longer than the first, and she’s stopped reading it out loud because the names started making the room uncomfortable. A boot company. A drink company, which Halloran vetoed in a voice I’d never heard him use. A streaming outfit that wants cameras in the house, which Cassian vetoed in a voice I had. The twins have an agent. Greenie has two, and hasn’t told Maddie about the second.

A month ago we were an introduction somebody wrote as a joke. Now there’s a bidding war over who gets to put their logo on the joke.

And through all of it, the ice. Three games, and on the ice we’re the thing nobody planned for. The team that wasn’t paid to lose and wasn’t paid to win and keeps doing the second one by accident.

Westmere went the way Maddie said it would. We played it like it was real, because it was real for forty minutes, and then at 12:40 of the third period with the score two-one, their senior line went out for a shift and their legs weren’t there. Not tired legs. Absent ones. A center who’d been winning draws all night lost three in a row with his stick barely on the ice. Their goalie, the big Alpha who cheats glove, cheated it so far on a shot from the point that he was looking at the wrong post when it went in off Killian’s blade.

The forty real minutes were the best we’ve played. Their rink’s a box, six feet short with the corners cut tight, and their cycle lives in those corners, three seniors moving the puck low in a triangle that never stops, and for two periods I held the lane Cassian moved a stick-length inward and I didn’t chase. Not once. The puck went around me and around me and I let it, with my stick in the passing seam and my eyes on the center’s hips, and on the third pass of the fourth cycle he looked where he was going before he went there and I was already there.