Page 183 of Slashed Bonds

That’s the thing I’m looking at. Not a mask. Not a Switch. Not the version of her that walks into a room already counting the exits. The thing under all of those, that was there on a pond before anyone put their hands on her, that four men tried to kill in a boardroom and couldn’t.

And I understand something, standing on Ashford’s ice in the slush with my ribs on fire and her forehead against my chin.

Our girl belongs on the ice.

CHAPTER 25

What Is Broken

~MORRIGAN~

“Aquick fuck in the car before the after-party isn’t in the cards after that game.”

I say it to the windshield. Then I side-eye him, because he’s grinning like a fool with his hand on the key, and the grin gets wider when he feels me looking.

“That didn’t stop you from fucking me in the locker room twenty minutes ago.”

An eyebrow. The left one, the one over the darker eye, arched like he’s asking a question in a language where the question’s already been answered.

I pout.

I give him the look that means fuck off in every dialect I speak, and he laughs. Out loud, head back against the seat, a sound that comes from somewhere low and has nothing careful in it.

Christ. Listen to that.

My heart does something I don’t have a word for. A swell. I’m positive, as positive as I am about anything after five days, that Nikolai Volkov is not a man who hands out his feelings for free, and here he is handing one out in a borrowed truck in a parking lot full of exhaust, and it’s for me.

He turns the key. Cassian’s truck wakes up like something large and patient.

“Hold on, Mommy.”

The traffic’s a disaster.

Ten thousand people trying to leave a building with four exits, and half of them on their phones instead of their pedals, and the lot’s a sea of brake lights all the way to the road. We’d never have gotten out the front. That’s why we went out the back. A service door Killian found during warm-ups, a corridor that smelled like fryer oil, and then the dark behind the arena where Cassian had parked. Not in the lot. On a gravel track past the dumpsters, a maintenance trail nobody’s figured out, pointing away from the building toward a line of trees.

He parked for the exit before the game started. Before he knew we’d need it. That’s not a captain’s trick. That’s a man who’s been leaving rooms through the back since he was seventeen.

Nikolai eases us down the track with the lights off until the trees close behind us, and then he turns them on and we’re on a two-lane road with nobody on it, and Ashford’s glow is a smear in the mirror.

I’m wearing Cassian’s sweater.

Black. Enormous. The neck of it slipping off one shoulder no matter how I pull it up, the sleeves past my fingertips, the whole thing smelling of cedar, of smoke, of the sweet thing I haven’t told him I can find. I’d put it on in the locker room after the shower, after Nikolai, after the team had cleared out to the bus hooting like a wedding party, and I’d stood there in it and realized I had nothing else to put on.

Game-day bag. Gear, tape, lipstick, meds. Not one thought about what happens after.

Because there’s never been an after. You play a money game and you take your cash and you go back to a shed. You don’t go to a party.

So we’re going to my place. For clothes. And I haven’t settled on the idea of Nikolai seeing it.

My shack. My excuse for a house. Four walls on Omega land that the benefactor’s lawyer bought for a woman who couldn’t sign her own name yet, and a door with four deadbolts, and a chair I wedge under the handle. A cot. A hot plate. The kind of place you’d drive past and assume was abandoned if it weren’t for the dog bowl by the step.

I turn it over, looking for the nerves.

They’re not there.

If he was going to judge me he’d have done it two years ago. He had every chance.

Two years of a room in the Underground and a man in a mask, and in those two years I owned three sets of lingerie. All lace. Black, oxblood, a green so dark it was black in most lights, and I rotated them, because that’s what you do when three is what you have. Everything else I wore in that room was the same four oversized pieces of black I wore everywhere else, the hoodie, the tank, two pairs of leggings with the knees going.