Page 79 of Slashed Bonds

She saw it in five shots.

I’ve been building my whole crease around a flaw nobody was good enough to find, and the first one who found it did it while I was still deciding whether I was allowed to call her mine.

Mine. Yes. Final answer.

And that’s the whole problem with the lights being on, isn’t it.

I wasn’t about to give anyone else in this building the chance to see what’s so obviously mine.

Or ours. I guess. Ours.

She said something to me in that locker room.

I’ve been holding it in my mouth for two hours, the way you hold a puck you don’t want to give back.

Omegas like me are destined for misery, Nikolai. And oddly enough, I don’t seek that ending for you.

She said it in her bra and underwear with every scar she owns under the lights, and she said it loud, so I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t heard, and then she walked away and left me sitting on a bench with my hands open.

Here’s what she got wrong.

Not the misery. She’s probably right about that. I’ve watched her for two years and I don’t think she’s had a day without it, and I don’t think she expects one.

She got the direction wrong.

She thinks she’s the thing that’ll ruin us.

That the broken bond, the sealed records, the whole ruined inventory, is a contagion, and she’s protecting us from catching it by standing outside the door.

As though we weren’t already sick. As though three men with files and a room nobody sleeps in have been living in perfect health, waiting for an Omega to come along and infect us.

I’m going to have to show her.

Not tell.

Telling’s for people who’ve had things go well when they were told. I’m going to have to prove it, one day at a time, with actions she can’t argue with, until the arithmetic in her head comes out different.

I’ve got four months and a room at the end of a hall. It’ll do.

Roz is standing in the middle of the hallway between the two factions with her keys already in her hand.

She has the look of a woman who made her decision in the car and is now enduring the part where everyone else catches up. It’s past her administrative hours. She has a bottle of something at home and a couch and a whole night of not being responsible for any of us, and I can see her weighing whether she gives a fuck if we settle this with our hands.

She does. She has to.

Because if we start, somebody’s going to end up in a hospital, and that goes against the entire plot and purpose of the last two weeks, which is a program clawing its way back into the limelight and the good graces of a hockey organization that has decided, overnight, that it wants blood on its ice.

For the views. For the sponsors. For the sake of a tournament bracket that finally has room.

Hilarious, truly.

I love a vicious battle of sports politics.

Nothing proves how selfish every last person in this industry is like watching them discover we’re useful. Four years of no. One bad quarter of ticket revenue, and here’s a committee liaison with a laminate on a lanyard, typing notes about our conduct while we break each other’s arms.

“Yes, yes. Yours.” Roz waves a hand at me the way you’d wave off a wasp. “No one was even fucking fighting you.”

She looks at Mori.