Page 209 of Slashed Bonds

Theater. Men skating hard enough to look like they’re trying and losing on schedule. And us, the one team nobody thought to pay, because nobody thought we’d be there.

It explains a thing I’ve been turning over since Ashford. Why their second-round opponent folded in the third period of a game they were winning. Why a goalie with a .930 let in three in six minutes. I’d put it down to legs. It wasn’t legs.

“And it means they don’t have a plan for us,” I say. “They’ve planned every game in the bracket but ours. They don’t think there’s a game to plan.”

Viper takes her hand off her jacket. Pulls out her phone. Not to call. To type, fast, with her thumbs, and she turns the screen to me when she’s done, and it’s a list. Five lines. Subsidiary. Gala. Marriage. Paid teams. Siblings. Nothing else. The bones of what we heard, in the order it’ll matter.

“Send that to the tall one,” she says. “You’ve got his number now.”

I do. In the C’s. And a ringtone that cuts the line.

I pull out my phone. I open the thread that has nothing in it yet, under one word, and I type four of my own.

Need to talk. All three. Tonight.

It’s read in eleven seconds. The reply is one word, and I can hear the voice it comes in.

Home.

A subsidiary being liquidated. A father hiding it. A gala before semis that has to go perfectly or the money runs. A marriage to secure assets. Paid teams. And a woman who talks about all of it on a phone in a changing room.

Westmere’s Thursday. I’d been thinking about Westmere as a game, their cycle and their glove-side goalie and the lane I’m supposed to hold, and it’s still a game, we still have to win it, but it’s a different game now. It’s a game somebody’s been told to lose. Which means their legs will go in the third on a schedule, and their goalie will find a reason to be slow, and the only variable in the building nobody’s accounted for is us.

Play it like it’s real. Beat them like they’re trying. Then look at the tape and find the moment they stopped.

Cassian’s going to want to sit down for this.

Killian’s going to want the recording, the names, the dates, the structure. He’s going to want to know which company owns which and where the load-bearing wall is.

And Nikolai’s going to want to know what time the gala starts.

I breathe out.

The confrontation made one thing clear, and it’s clear in a way nothing’s been so prominent in five years.

Naomi’s empire is struggling, and now we have the first domino piece to ensure everything goes crashing fucking down.

CHAPTER 30

Blow On The Spoon

~MORRIGAN~

“AND I’D SHIT IN THE PIE AND FEED IT TO THE FUCKERS AGAIN!”

The lounge erupts.

Maddie’s hollering. On her feet, both fists in the air, pink pony swinging, like the woman on the couch has scored in overtime. Viper’s gone visibly disturbed, which for Viper is a quarter-inch tightening at the corner of her black mouth and a slow lean back into the armchair. Half the team is gagging. Dubois has his hand over his face. Okonkwo’s making a sound into a cushion. Greenie’s laughing so hard he’s gone silent, folded over on the floor by the fireplace with his phone face down beside him, which is the second time this month I’ve seen the phone face down.

I’m cringing.

At the story, at the delivery, at the fact that I’ve laughed so hard my ribs hurt, and I’m taking in the woman on the couch who told it.

Valerie Vixen Reinferd. Say the whole thing. It deserves the whole thing.

She’s sitting in the middle of our couch like she’s owned it since the horses lived here. One leg over the other, long, in black jeans tucked into boots that have seen a stage. Hair the deep red of a wine stain, pulled back hard. A sleeve on each arm, both of them full, both of them better than anything I’ve seen walk into a rink. And a face that has watched men try to make her smaller and found the exercise boring.

Dominant. That’s the word, and it’s not a word I use for Omegas, because the world doesn’t let us keep it. She keeps it. She wears it like the boots.