Page 247 of Slashed Bonds
“Seventy-four.” His fingers find a knot and work it loose without pulling. “Against Okonkwo, who’s been watching my hands for three years and cheats the drop like it’s his religion. Seventy-four, and the last twenty I didn’t lose one.”
He’s back. Not all the way. But the hole’s got a ladder in it now and he’s on the ladder.
“Theo’s at sixty-one for the season,” I say. “Sixty-eight on his strong side. He goes backhand on the left dot every time the game’s tight because he doesn’t trust his forehand under lights, and when he goes backhand he opens his mouth.”
“I know.”
“I know you know. I’m saying it so you know I know.”
“I’ve read the book, Malice.”
“You wrote the book, Cap. I’m the one who lived in it.”
His hand pauses. Starts again.
“Page nine,” he says. “Your handwriting. The margin.”
He found it. The note I left in his book at three in the morning on Tuesday when I couldn’t sleep and he was sitting in the dark kitchen. ‘Theo flinches when a stick comes near his left hand. Old break, never set right. Tap it on the way to the dot and he’ll lose the draw before it drops.’
“Is it true?” he asks.
“I lived in it,” I say again.
“Then Dubois taps the stick. Not me.” He’s thinking out loud now, the gray eyes gone somewhere over my shoulder to a sheet of ice that isn’t here yet. “If I do it, the linesman sees it and I’m in the box before the drop. If Dubois does it coming through the circle, it’s a winger being clumsy on his way to the hash marks, and Theo’s left hand is already thinking about an old break when the puck hits the ice.”
“And you’ve got the puck.”
“And Dorian’s already sliding because that’s the play, that’s always the play, they’ve run it so many times they run it on a lost draw out of habit.” His eyes come back to me. “And you’re there.”
“And I’m there.”
Seven days. A tap, a draw, a slide, a sound. Four people and four jobs and none of them is the one the crowd came to see.
There’s coffee somewhere below us. It comes up through the floor the way the pasta did a week ago, dark, bitter, real, and under it butter in a pan, and my stomach does a thing I’m still not used to it doing, which is answer.
Hungry. First thing. Before I’ve stood up. Six weeks ago I’d have gone till noon on a cracker and called it discipline.
Maddie’s up, then. Maddie’s the only person in this house who makes coffee like she’s angry at it. She’ll have been up since six waiting for someone to come down and tell her everything, and she’ll have fed Knox twice out of nerves, and when I walk into that kitchen she’s going to look at the spider on my arm and know exactly who put it there.
Later. The coffee will keep. The man above me won’t.
“Did you have fun?”
I think about it. Properly, because he asked properly.
“Killian’s a good dancer.”
I say it with a sly grin, and I watch it land, and I watch him decide not to be jealous of a man cuffed to the other side of his bed.
“Made it more fun than I expected.”
“Now instead of frat parties with shitty alcohol,” he says, “we should go to luxury clubs. The ones with real food. And alcohol that doesn’t make you feel like this after.”
“I thought all alcohol did that.”
“Not in my tax bracket, darling.”
He hums it. And I giggle. An actual giggle, out loud, into the pillow, because I’m coming to understand that Cassian Vane is a dangerous kind of jack of all trades. A captain who reads faceoff dots. A man who sits on graves. A son with a father who owns hospital wings and hunts packs, and a Black Amex he hands to green-haired strangers to give to the woman he hasn’t slept with yet.
