Page 128 of Slashed Bonds

“I had a future.”

She fights a sob. Loses. Blinks the tears down and hiccups on the next breath like a child.

“My mom was so fucking proud. My dad…” A sound that wants to be a laugh. “He’d do everything not to show that fucking smile. My brother was so pumped. He told his whole class. And my sister wanted…she wanted to be me. She wanted to be on the ice. She wanted to prove Omegas belong there too.”

Wren. Fourteen. In a house with a name that isn’t hers.

“Knox was happy. I had a home. Not a fucking shed. A home.” She’s rocking, a small motion, forward and back. “I was safe. I was loved. I had a future that was bright to the rest of the world.”

Her shoulders go.

I watch them drop the way I’ve watched a defenseman’s shoulders drop when he knows the pass is behind him. And her eyes go glassy, and in them, under the tears, is a sadness so old and so plain that it doesn’t need any of the rest of it to be true.

“I could have…been a mother.”

Fuck.

“I saw the two lines. And I…I wanted to tell them so bad. I wanted them to be happy.”

It takes everything.

Every year of training my face to stay where it is. Every faceoff I’ve ever won by giving nothing away. I hold it. I keep my expression at neutral, and inside my chest, something that’s been sleeping since I was seventeen gets up and starts walking.

The protective one. The Alpha in the basement.

Because there’s one thing on this earth I can’t be neutral about.

Kids.

I’d like to say that’s a moral position. It isn’t. It’s a scar. Losing my sister to a pack who decided she was theirs to take, and a pregnancy she didn’t choose, and a system that looked at an Omega in a hospital bed and saw a liability, apparently didn’t scar me enough. Because here I am, kneeling in frost, with a woman telling me about two lines, and the thing in my chest is on its feet.

Not now. Not yet. Listen.

I’d be their tool. That’s the line I’m going to hear in the shower for a month. Not the window. Not the vial. That one. A girl who thought love was a thing you paid for in exhaustion, and paid, and kept paying, and was told the account was overdrawn.

I’ve read her draws on tape until four in the morning. I’ve watched her put a two-hundred-pound winger on his back with geometry. I’ve never once seen her tired, and now I know it’s because she trained herself, at seventeen, to make tired invisible for the convenience of four men who called it devotion.

“They set me up,” she whispers.

Her hands come up.

They’re shaking so hard the fingers won’t close properly, and they find the front of my hoodie and grip it, both fists, the way you’d grab a railing on a boat. Like she’s fighting for something with weight. Something that’ll hold.

“They set me up. They signed the contract to get rid of me. They loved another.” Her knuckles go white. “And they took everything. My home. My parents. My siblings. They hurt Knox. My career. My future. My fucking dreams.”

A breath.

“They watched me get thrown out that window. Even though it meant I could be paralyzed.”

She stops.

Like that’s the summit. Like that’s the worst of it. And I watch her close her eyes, deliberately, so she won’t have to see my face for what comes next.

“But I asked. What about the baby. And…”

Her voice goes somewhere I’ve never heard a voice go.

“And even after all of the pain. The agony. The recovery. The fucking ward. They didn’t care. The baby was no more. And they were okay with that. Like everything else in my life.”