Page 295 of Slashed Bonds

“Oh.”

A pause while I fork a piece of black cake into my mouth. Dark chocolate. Nearly bitter. Valerie’s miniature viper comes apart on my tongue.

“Is that a problem?” Dana says, carefully.

“Not for me.” I swallow. “I’ll let my Alphas reach out.”

“Your—“

“They’re a bit busy today. There’s a baby shower. I’ll have them call you Monday with the paperwork. Will Monday work for the office? Sorry, for you?”

“Monday’s,” she says, “that’s—yes. Monday’s acceptable. I’ll flag the file as pending.”

“You’re an angel, Dana.”

She laughs, a surprised sound, the sound of a woman who’s been on the phone with coaches all day and didn’t expect to be called an angel by anybody. Then the voice goes back to the paper.

“While I have you. The preliminary schedule’s been released. Blackridge will play three preliminaries against programs from the previous bracket, Ashford, Westmere, Carrow, home and away alternating, then two games against new entrants before the semifinal round. The new entrants are the northern program you faced in the final, under new sponsorship, and a program from the coast that’s joining the structure this year. Coach Ibarra has the dates.”

“Ashford first?”

“Ashford first. The seventeenth.”

Ashford. Brandt, the sophomore with the pinch. Halvard, who skates like he’s apologizing to the ice. Three to two in overtime, Cassian’s figure-skater spin, Nikolai’s fifty-one saves. Westmere, hundred ninety-four feet, three seniors on the cycle, a goalie who cheats glove and gives you blocker low. Carrow, two to one, a building that smells like a locker room somebody drowned in. I don’t need Coach Ibarra’s dates. I’ve got the dates. I’ve got every shift of every game they played last season in a drawer in my head and I can take any of them out and look at the tape.

“Can’t wait,” I say. “Thank you, Dana. Bye-bye.”

The call ends. The stairwell’s cold. Concrete, iron railings, the smell of a hundred years of flour dust and the newer smell of the rubber mats Nikolai had put on the landings so nobody breaks a neck. I eat the rest of the cake standing there, listening to the party through the fire door, the twins arguing, Roz’s laugh, the dog’s tags.

Three preliminaries against teams who’ve already lost to us. Two against teams who think they’re new. Then semis. Then the final again. Under lights, this time with a sponsor’s name on the boards and a cheque behind it.

I take the draw. That’s the rule. The rostered Omega takes the opening faceoff, for the cameras, for the league, for whatever quiet man in a suit wrote the rule thinking it’d make for a nice photo. Cassian hates it. He sulks about it the way he sulks about everything, which is handsome.

He thinks I’m there for the photo.

I was a winger in the east until I was seventeen. Left side. Short, so nobody looked for me. Mean, so nobody forgot me after they found me. I had hands that could lift a stick out of a man’s grip without his ever feeling the lift and a shoulder that put two players bigger than Killian Graves through the boards in one season, and the officials never called it, because I was five foot two, blonde then, and crying by the time they’d skated over.

They always came to see if I was all right.

I always was.

* * *

Greenie finds me on the landing.

He’s got frosting on his thumb, green hair pushed back under the beanie, that face, the open one, the one that looks at me like I’m a thing that happened to him by accident and he’s not sure he deserves. He’s holding a second plate of cake.

“You left your gift,” he says. “Mori woke up. She’s opening things. The twins got her a hockey stick for the baby. An actual stick. It’s taller than she is.”

“Which twin?”

“Both. They split the cost. They said it’s a two-Alpha stick.” He pauses. “Everything okay? You’ve got your phone face on.”

“My what?”

“Your phone face.” He touches his own face, a vague motion. “You go kind of flat. Like when you’re reading something you don’t like.”

Nineteen freckles. A twentieth under the jaw. And he reads me, this one. He reads me and he doesn’t know what he’s reading, and that’s the most dangerous thing about him and the thing I like most.