Page 185 of Slashed Bonds

Bare bones. That’s what I’ve been living on. Bones so bare there’s nothing left to boil.

And Maddie was there.

I know she was. I didn’t see her, and I didn’t look, because she knows better than anyone alive how I get on a game day. Locked in. Tunnel. The world narrows to a sheet and a net and the hands of whoever’s in front of me, and the people who love me know to stand outside the tunnel and wait. She’d have been in the lower bowl with her phone up and her pink hair under a Blackridge hat, filming everything, and by now the spin is on eleven thousand phones with the hiss under it, and by morning it’ll be a hundred thousand, and she’ll have milked every second of it.

She’ll have the forehead kiss. God help us all. She’ll have it from three angles.

We didn’t touch base. We will. She’ll have the rest of the week to talk my ear off, and I’ll let her, because I owe her a year of listening.

I smirk.

Small. At the dark road. Because it’s landing on me now, with the adrenaline gone to a hum and the truck warm, what the ice did to me tonight.

Alive. Cassian said it, or his face did, when he had his mouth on my forehead. And he was right. I felt free out there in a way I haven’t felt since I was eighteen, lit up, every nerve I own pointed at one thing, and under the lit-up feeling a quieter one, older, that said this is where you go. This is where you’ve always gone.

Belonging. That’s the word. I belong on a sheet of ice the way other people belong in a house.

I don’t expect us to go all the way.

I’d like that on record too. We’re a team of rejects that’s been a team for five days, with a goalie who goes still in the wrong moments and a defenseman who’s only now learned to shoot and a captain whose idea of a plan is a whiteboard he won’t let anyone photograph. The finals are weeks and five rounds away and there are programs in this bracket with budgets, depth, a dozen players who aren’t carrying what we’re carrying.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point was the statement. And we made it. Tonight, in somebody else’s house, a bunch of men with ink over their hearts and metal in their faces and pills in their pockets, and one Omega with a scar under her collar that four men put there, went out on a sheet of ice in front of ten thousand people who came to laugh and played like professionals.

And fucking won.

Society looks at the surface. Tonight the surface looked back.

Something touches the side of my neck.

Soft. Warm. Two fingers, light, on the ink over the scar, and I turn toward it and we’re at a stoplight, red, the only light for a mile, and Nikolai’s looking at me.

Not driving. Looking. Taking me in with his whole face the way he does when he thinks I don’t notice, with his hand resting against my neck like he’s checking a pulse he already knows the rhythm of.

“You good?”

I blink.

And I smile. A small one, the slow kind, the kind that doesn’t show the piercing, and I nod and I lean into his hand. Press my cheek against his palm like I need it there.

Like I’m yearning for it. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what this is.

“I’m good.”

He lets himself smirk. It’s a careful thing, that smirk, released a quarter inch at a time like he’s checking it’s allowed.

The light goes green.

I lean across the console and put my head on his shoulder, and he doesn’t move except to drive. His hair’s a mess. The two tones of it, the platinum side and the black side, still damp from a shower and stiff with dried sweat where the shower missed, falling over his ear in a way he’d never allow in daylight. I can see his face from here, from below, lit by the dash.

Relief. That’s what’s on it. Not the triumph the crowd saw. Something underneath, a loosening at the jaw, a man who stood in a net for seventy minutes being the last thing between a scoreboard and a woman he’s claimed, and didn’t let it through.

Fifty-one saves. I counted. Somebody should tell him he’s allowed to be proud of that. Somebody should be me.

I close my eyes. I’ll tell him later.

The truck hums. The road’s long and the night’s dark and I’m warm in a sweater that isn’t mine with my head on a shoulder that is, and somewhere in the hum I go.