Page 266 of Slashed Bonds

“You call that a serve?”

“I call it a serve you couldn’t return.”

“I returned it.”

“Into a Honda.”

“The Honda was in the court.”

“There IS no court, you absolute⁠—“

“If you two need to go into the grocery-store washroom and fuck it out,” Cassian says, from his side of the net, racket on his shoulder, shaking his head like a man who’s been doing this for four years and will be doing it for forty, “hurry the fuck up. We’ve got dinner after this and I don’t have time for your foolishness.”

They cuss him off. In unison. Different languages.

I look at the three of them across a net made of string and carts, and I look at their left hands.

There they are. All three. I keep looking.

Valerie did them after me, one after the other, in the chair I’d warmed, while I sat on the couch with Knox’s head in my lap and a mocha frap sweating in my good hand and watched. Monarchs. Smaller than mine, sized to a man’s hand, across the back of the left from the knuckle to the wrist bone, with the aura running between the tendons so that when they make a fist, the shadow moves. Same umber. Same smoke. Val drew each one by eye and each one’s different the way three brothers are different, and you’d never mistake them for anything but a set.

And on each ring finger, one small thing.

Not butterflies. A crown. Tiny, low on the finger, where a band would sit, so that a ring would slide up under it and the crown would sit on the ring.

“Won’t be a problem when we’re staring at our wedding rings.” He said it filling out a form. And then he sat down in a chair and had it drawn on him like it was the most ordinary thing a man could do on a Friday.

Nikolai’s is cling-wrapped like mine. Killian’s is bare already, because Killian doesn’t believe in instructions. Cassian’s got a glove on his left hand, a thin black one, because Cassian reads the aftercare sheet and follows it.

“Mori.” Nikolai, beside me, racket up. “Daddy’s serving. Pay attention.”

“Mommy’s always paying attention.”

“Mommy was staring at Cap’s hand.”

“Mommy can do two things.”

He serves. Hard, overhand, the way a goalie throws a puck up ice, and Killian returns it, and it comes to me, and I’m there before it is. That’s the thing about this week. The half-beat. I’ve been drilling it on a sheet of ice for a month and it’s followed me into a parking lot, and my racket’s where the birdie’s going to be before the birdie’s decided.

Cassian’s watching that. I can see him do it, between points. Reading my feet. The man can’t turn it off, not for a game with a plastic shuttlecock, and he’s clocked that I’m arriving early and he’s filing it for Thursday.

Six days ago I got boarded by a kid from Carrow and couldn’t lift my arm above my shoulder for a day. Today I could put him through the glass with the arm and apologize after.

“You’re early on everything,” Cassian says, across the net, when the point’s done. Not a compliment. An observation, the way he’d say the ice is soft in a corner.

“I’ve been early for a month.”

“You’ve been a half beat early for a month. You’re a full beat early today. That’s the ink.” He turns his gloved hand over, looks at the back of it. “Val said forty-eight hours of this and then it levels. Don’t trust it Thursday. Trust the half beat you earned.”

He’s right. The thing that’s lit in me is borrowed. The thing that was there before I sat in a chair is mine, and it’s the one that took a pass in the shin pads.

“Noted, Cap.”

“Don’t call me Cap with a racket in your hand.”

“What should I call you?”

“Losing,” says Nikolai, and serves.