Page 228 of Slashed Bonds

He said, “Okay.”

Then he’d said, “Wear something I can find you in,” and gone down the stairs, and I’d stood on the landing understanding that I’d asked a man to a party and been given a mission brief.

That was the whole negotiation. I’ve thought about it since. He said okay too fast for a man who’d never once in five weeks let me go anywhere he hadn’t mapped first, and the speed of it has been sitting in my chest like a stone I can’t swallow.

Maddie dressed me. Pink hands, black dress, no argument allowed. Something short with a back that isn’t there, and the heels, and my hair down and straightened for the first time in a year, and the red on my mouth that’s usually under a cage. In the mirror I looked like a woman who goes to parties. I looked like a girl who used to.

And Viper did the rest.

A thing in my ear that looks like an earring and isn’t. A thing in the lining of my clutch that she said not to ask about. And two small white pills in a tin in my bra, which she pressed into my hand on the porch with her black mouth flat.

“One if you feel it coming on. Both if you’ve already gone. Don’t let anyone see you take them.”

“What’s it coming on like?”

“Like the best feeling you’ve ever had and then like nothing.” She’d looked at me. “You’ll know. You’ve known.”

I have. I knew it in a boardroom with a coffee cup in my hand that somebody had been kind enough to pour.

Maddie had stood on the porch beside her with her arms crossed over her pink coat, not saying the thing she wanted to say, which was don’t go. She’d said it with her eyebrows instead. Then she’d fixed a strand of my hair that didn’t need fixing and said, “If anybody touches you, I want names. Full names. Middle names. I’m going to find their mothers.”

She would. She’d find their mothers and bring them a casserole and ruin their sons over coffee.

He parks.

Not in the driveway, which is a parade of cars that cost more than houses, but a block down, on a side street under a dead streetlight, nose out. He’d explained the car on the way. He didn’t want to bring Cassian’s truck because everyone on this side of town knows the truck. When Captain turns up at a place like this, people take pictures of the truck before they take pictures of him, and tonight nobody’s taking pictures of anything.

The Mercedes is his. Black, old, the kind with a body that’s all edges, and it smells like him. Iron and cold. And faintly, under that, something I’ve only caught on him twice, both times at night.

Cassian’s at the rink. That’s the other reason the truck’s in the drive. He came back from the cemetery with grass on his knees and something restored in his face, and the next morning he was at the dot at six with a bucket of pucks and Roz dropping them, and he’s been there every morning since.

Seventy-one percent yesterday. Against Okonkwo, who cheats on the drop and knows Cash’s hands. He’s climbing out.

And the tape. Hellsing Ross tape, hours of it, from four seasons, cut by Cassian into a thing he calls the book and won’t let anyone photograph. I’ve sat with it three nights running. Theo on the dot, breathing through his mouth before the drop, the way he did at eighteen when he thought nobody was looking. Rhys on the wing, glass-and-out on his backhand every time, so predictable I could set a clock by the boards. Dorian drifting high on the penalty kill, leaving the seam he’s left since juniors. And Silas, in the net, dropping early, afraid of the top of the frame, a goalie you beat by waiting a half beat longer than he can stand.

Their play. The weak-side one-timer. Theo wins the draw back, Rhys walks the wall, Dorian slides to the far dot while every eye in the building goes to the puck, and the pass comes across through a lane they’ve cleared with bodies. They’ve scored eleven goals on it this season. Cassian’s drawn it in red on the whiteboard in his room with my number on the far dot.

“You know where Dorian’s going before Dorian does,” he’d said. “Be there first. Take the lane away. Let them run it into you.”

I’ve been running it in my head for a week. On the ice, in the shower, on the beanbag with Knox on my feet. Dorian slides, I slide, the pass comes across into my shin pads instead of his blade, and the building hears the sound. Over and over. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever imagined, and I’m wearing a backless dress to a frat party eight days before I get to do it.

Pine. He’s got pine on him. Knox brought him a branch once and I think he kept it.

“Now.” I turn in my seat. “How did you get Nikolai to not come?”

Curiosity, more than anything. Nikolai’s been glued to me since the cemetery, since Cassian came home with grass stains on his knees and something back in his face, and the idea of him letting me walk out the door in this dress on Killian’s arm without following on foot is a physics problem.

Killian reaches into his jacket. Comes out with a cigarette. Cracks the window an inch and the cold comes in with the bass.

“I drugged him.”

I stare at him.

Blink. Twice. Wait for the corner of his mouth to do the thing it does when he’s lying for effect.

It doesn’t.

He’s not joking. He put something in Nikolai’s drink and left him on a couch.