Page 241 of Slashed Bonds

“Gala?”

Dox looks at me.

“There’s a gala coming up,” I tell him. “The week before semis. We’ve got our invites. Roz handed them out like hall passes and told us if we didn’t go she’d skate us until we bled.” I rub my face. “All the rich fuckers are going to be in one room. They’re thriving on this hockey shit now. Especially since we brought a twist to it.”

“Expected,” Dox says.

We look at Viper. She’s shrugging again.

“Why wait, then?” Valerie asks.

“Simple.”

And Viper grins.

Manic. There’s no other word. The black mouth going wide, the green eyes going bright, a thing on her face that I’ve seen on Nikolai at minute four and on nobody else, and I make a note, right there in the van, that I will never in my life piss this woman off. Not once. Not by accident. I wonder, for a second, who her Alphas are, if she has them, and what they’d have to be made of to stand in a room with that grin and not leave it. Something worse than me. Something that makes me look like a man who reads walls for a hobby.

“They’ll be married by then.”

Oh. Shit.

We all share a look. Me, Dox, Valerie. The dots connecting, one to the next, like lights coming on down a hallway.

Married. Before the semis. To lock the assets, Naomi said, in a changing room, into a phone. And Theo’s inheritance locked behind an heir, and the heir impossible, and four fathers at a table going under, and a gala full of money looking for a team to put its name on.

She’s going to let them marry. She’s going to let the ink dry. And then she’s going to tell a room full of sponsors that the Ross heir married a woman who can’t give him one, the week before the only game that matters.

The ride back is quiet after that.

Nobody speaks. The puzzle’s putting itself together in four heads at once, piece by piece, each one slotting in so cleanly it’s chilling, the way a wall’s chilling when you see it’s been built to come down on a particular date.

And underneath the chill, something else.

I let myself have it. With Mori’s head in my lap now, where Viper moved it, and my hand on her hair, and her breath gone slow and even under the drip. How this is going to turn out. How our Monarch is going to be standing in a room, on a night, watching the downfall of every person who dared reach into her life and slash at her bonds, at her dreams, at the small hand she’d pictured on a bench.

And then I get to interfere.

Truly. Not with a phone. With the thing I’m for.

That makes me grin. In the dark, in a van, with a woman asleep on my thigh. Because there’s a plan waiting for them that nobody in this van has heard, that Cassian hasn’t heard, that I’ve been building row by row since a balcony and a cigarette. The gala’s Viper’s. The record’s Cassian’s. The ice is all of ours.

But there’s a fourth tier. And it’s mine.

Dorian slides to the weak dot. Mori’s already there. The pass hits her shins. That’s Cassian’s play, and it’s a good one. Mine’s what happens on the next shift, when Theo Ross comes up the wall with his head down because he’s angry, and finds out what a wall is.

I’ve watched him on the book for a week. Not the draws, those are Cassian’s. The shift after a lost draw. Theo Ross loses a faceoff clean and he does the same thing every time, four seasons running: he chases. Up the wall, head down, stick on the ice, trying to win back the puck his hands lost, and he comes through the neutral zone with his shoulders square to the boards instead of to the play.

A man who skates angry skates into things. I’m going to be the thing.

Clean. That’s the part I’ve promised myself, on a balcony, to a man with my cigarette. Shoulder to chest, feet on the ice, nothing the liaison can write a page about. A hit the tape will show forty times from four angles and find nothing wrong with. And Theo Ross will sit on the ice with his back against the glass the way Halvard sat, looking up at the Omega he threw out a window, who’ll already have turned away from him to find the puck.

Eight days.

We reach the house.

And Dox whistles.

Low, through his teeth, which isn’t a good sign from a man who doesn’t make sounds he doesn’t need. I lean to the window.