Page 277 of Slashed Bonds

Everyone. They were for everyone. For the day one of us said “nah” into a toilet and she didn’t believe us.

She uncrosses her arms and reaches into the pocket of her jacket and comes out with something, and holds it up between two gloved fingers the way she held up a Black Amex in my bedroom six weeks ago.

Our jaws drop.

A stick. White, plastic, with a cap off and a window in it, and I know what it is before my brain’s finished deciding not to know, because I’ve held one before, in a bathroom on Alder Row, over a drawer.

“Welp.” Viper. Flat. “This is the culprit of why you’re not going on the ice, Malice.”

She turns the window toward me.

Two lines.

“You’re pregnant.”

The world must be spinning.

It has to be, because the stall tilts, and the porcelain under my arm goes soft, and I’m looking at a pregnancy test with my own urine on it that my friend got, I can only assume, from a toilet I couldn’t flush to save my life, and she’s telling me, me, the Omega who’s been certain since a hospital curtain that this door was welded shut⁠—

Pregnant.

Caesura. Six-week half-life. Follicular atresia. Permanent. Every doctor who’s ever looked at the chart said permanent. Lessard said permanent. Built to maintain, not heal.

And a woman in a basement said an ink gun. And a woman in a van said a clinic three states over keeps records. And a woman at a desk two towns over took me off every pill they’d ever flattened me with and said six months before it’s steady.

Four weeks. Maybe five. A shower. A grave. A bed with handcuffs in it. One of those. All of those.

“I’m gonna pass out.”

I say it calmly. Because there are black spots. Actual ones, at the edges, coming in like the house lights going down a bank at a time before a spot finds the captain.

A nap. A nappy nap, before the game. That’s probably smart. That’s probably what a doctor would say.

“Breathe,” Viper says. Not kindly. The way she’d say it to a patient. “In through the nose. You’re not passing out on a bathroom floor at the Civic, you’ve done enough bathroom floors.”

“How long have you known.”

“Known? Ten seconds. Suspected?” The stick goes back in her pocket like a pen. “Since you asked for pickles. Confirmed when you yawned at Theo Ross. Nobody yawns at Theo Ross on willpower alone.”

Maddie’s crying.

Silently, the pink of her gone to blotches under the black, both hands over her mouth, and when she takes them away the first thing she says, in a whisper, like it’s a secret the stall shouldn’t hear, is: “Two butterflies.”

On my finger. One above the other, where a band would sit. The one I lost. The one I’d yearn for until my next life.

I didn’t have to wait for the next one.

“Mommy is pregnant?”

The voice comes from the door I’d forgotten was a door.

Behind us. Where Viper had been leaning and wasn’t anymore, because somewhere in the last minute she’d moved to crouch beside Maddie and left the thing unguarded, and I’d put money on that being the only unguarded door of her life and on it not being an accident.

Oh.

As if things couldn’t be more gracious in this moment, I manage, slowly, to turn my head. Maddie’s turning hers. Viper’s already looking past both of us with one eyebrow up, because Viper heard the door and didn’t say anything, because Viper never does.

And standing in the open doorway of the visitors’ washroom at the Civic Arena, in full gear, pads and all, with his glove under one arm and his mask pushed up on his head and his two-toned hair flattened under it, is Nikolai.