Page 206 of Slashed Bonds

I lean in.

Our faces are inches apart now. I can see the powder on her skin. And whatever’s in my eyes makes her freeze, because I watch it happen, the stillness going through her under the front she’s holding, the animal part of her understanding before the rest of her does.

“I’ll say this once.”

My voice has dropped. Not loud. Low, level, the register I use with Nikolai when he’s going somewhere I need him to come back from.

“The one with the upper hand here is me. Because unlike you, who’s still got the empire and the money and the fake friends and the faker fan base, and four men who only deem you valuable so long as you keep securing their petty-ass careers…” I let it sit. “I have nothing to fucking lose, Naomi.”

Something clicks.

In her. I see it land, the way I saw Halvard understand a wall a half second before it took him, and her pupils go wide, and in the wide there’s a flicker. One. Fear. Small and bright as a struck match.

And I grin.

Too much pride in it. I can feel the grin stretching the piercing in my lip and I don’t rein it in.

“When your fuckers tied me to a chair and slashed my arms open hoping they’d hit a nerve that’d keep me off the ice forever, it wasn’t enough.” Flat. A list. “When you threw me out of that window after you’d made sure I could never bond with another pack, and never carry another child, it wasn’t enough.”

Her lips part. Nothing comes out.

“And now you dare stand in my face and talk to me about redemption?” I tilt my head the other way. “Let me ask you something.”

I lean in. Past her cheek. Until my mouth’s at her ear the way hers was at mine, and I breathe the honey and the wire and I whisper into the perfume.

“Who the fuck needs redemption? Me? Or you?”

Silence.

Absolute. She says nothing, and I pull back, slow, and give her a smile that’s got something devious living in it, and I watch her try to find her footing and not find it.

“Our paths are going to cross again.” Conversational now. Light. “We’re on the same playing field, you and me, for the first time. But let me make something crystal clear.”

I pause.

On purpose. Long enough that the silence makes her look at me, because she has no other choice, because the whole store’s gone quiet and the only thing in it is my mouth about to open.

“We’re not playing the same game.”

The bolt. It’s sliding. Let it.

“I’m not fighting for five years to win a trophy that’s going to sit in a glass case getting dusty for nobody. I’m not chasing cameras. I’m not begging for attention or clawing my way to playoffs for the glory of it.” I smile wider. “Rejects don’t play to succeed, Naomi.”

And it clicks.

All the way home. I feel it go, a thing settling into a place it’s been shaped for, and the feeling that comes up behind it is so rich I want to giggle like a woman who’s lost her mind, because it’s the first seed. The first one I’ve planted on purpose. I can feel it go into the ground.

“We play to ruin.”

Her face.

“To taint. To prove, on a sheet of ice, how thin the skill is on you perfect lot of professionals have under the lights you’ve been bought. You talk down from your hills like you own them, and a group of misfits, as you call them, is going to run you fuckers into the fucking ground.”

I giggle.

It gets out before I can stop it, high and strange, and I have to tame it with my teeth so it doesn’t go all the way to mad.

“Oh.” A thought. “Or should I say, into a pit of snakes. Where you belong.”