I could feel his lust, the dark memory of the things he’d wanted to do to me in his chambers yesterday.
“Me too, Daddy,” I repled.
“Yes. I can feel it. Now, I didn’t want to waste any time. So, I have invoked a clause,” he said.
I waited.
“My very first.” He paused. “I have asked aloud, this morning, for one thing I want.”
My mouth went dry.
“What is it?” I said.
He turned. He crossed the chamber to a low chest along the far wall and he lifted something from it. Something I had not seen. Something he had set there before I woke.
He brought it to the bed.
He set it on the white silk beside my hip.
A small white box, wrapped in red ribbon. He bade me undo it and when I did, my eyes widened.
Inside, were my boots.
My actual competition boots. The ones I had left in a bag in the back of my closet in Spokane Valley after Tokyo and had never opened. The leather was dark, oiled, softened by time into something richer than it had been when it was new. The blades had been sharpened. I could see the fresh edge on them, the clean bright line of metal untouched since then and ready. The laces were new—waxed, white, the kind of laces you put on boots you mean to use.
My breath stopped.
“How?” I asked.
“I have resources,” he said. Quietly. “The same resources that funded your rink. The same hand that reached across the Veil and found a bronze medalist from Salt Lake to teach your children.”
He let me look.
The boots sat on the white silk like question I would have to answer. I could smell them. The leather. The wax. The faint metallic undernote of the blades. My body knew them. My body knew the weight of them, the feel of the tongue against the instep, the lock of the ankle when the laces were pulled tight. My body knew, and my body was already, secretly, reaching for them.
“I want,” he said, “to skate with you.”
The words landed.
“On ice I have made. Not on a rink. A lake. A frozen lake, under my sky, with no boards and no judges and no crowd. Just you. Just me. The two of us, on ice that knows your name.”
I laughed.
I hadn’t meant to. It came out as the small apologetic laugh I had used since Tokyo—high, thin, no humor in it, a sound that was meant to route the feeling somewhere safe before it could land.
“Oh,” I said. “No. I don’t—I haven’t—not since—“
The deflections stacked.
“I’m not that person anymore, my Lord. You don’t want to see what’s left. I haven’t put these on since Tokyo. The muscle memory is gone. The edges are gone. I teach four-year-olds how to stand up. I don’t—I can’t—you really don’t want—I won’t.“
The bond seized.
It happened in both wrists at once. The braid of red and gold tightened—not the warm pulse of the contract room, not the singing hum of the morning—a band of heat, sudden and precise, racing up both arms from the pulse to the elbow, and the heat was not pain. It was rejection. The contract refusing the smallness.
I gasped.
The heat climbed to my shoulders. It sat there, banked, waiting. The sigils on both forearms glowed—the red darker, the gold brighter, the two of them braided in a band that said, very clearly, you promised.
