Page 211 of Slashed Bonds

“The usual terms,” Greenie says from the floor, “being that we pay triple and the Omegas pay nothing.”

“The usual terms being that Alphas who want an Omega in their chair can afford to keep her there.” She doesn’t look at him. She’s looking at me. “You’ve got a pack, Malice. You don’t pay.”

You’ve got a pack. Said like Meg says sold out. A fact on a shelf.

I don’t correct her. Three weeks ago I’d have corrected her. I open my mouth to do it and the room’s full of men who’ve been feeding me soup, and I close it again.

“Butterfly,” I say instead. “Monarch. Left forearm.”

“With a crown,” Viper adds, from the chair, without opening her eyes.

Valerie looks at my arm again. At the space. “I’ll draw it tonight.”

Greenie’s falling.

Hard. I can see it from here. He’s on the floor laughing at something she said and his eyes keep going to her like they’re on a string, and he’s trying not to, and he’s losing, and the twins are losing in stereo beside him. Ansel on the arm of the couch and Aurel on the floor against it, both of them with their faces turned to the pink like plants to a window.

There’s tea brewing there. Three Alphas and a woman who’s said we’re only fucking about one of them. Maddie knows. Maddie knows everything. She’s pretending she doesn’t, which is her version of mercy, and I’m not going to be the one to point.

Not tonight. Tonight’s for pie stories and pasta.

The pasta.

It’s been smelling up the whole house for an hour. We’re in the lounge, the big room off the kitchen with the stone fireplace and the long couches and the window that looks at the quad, and through the arch I can see Nikolai at the stove with his back to us, shirtless, in gray joggers, doing something to a pot that involves his whole upper body. Garlic. Browned butter. Something green and sharp, basil or the like. Tomatoes cooked down past sweet into something darker. And under it, the meaty, slow smell of a sauce that’s been going since before I got home.

He cooks. He cooks like that. I’ve known him two and a half weeks and nobody told me he could do this.

Killian’s helping. Which means Killian is standing beside him with a knife and a cutting board doing exactly what he’s told in exactly the order he’s told it, because Killian treats a recipe like a load calculation. Cassian went in ten minutes ago. He said he was going to make sure there was no fuckery in the pasta sauce, which is a sentence I’ve heard him say twice now and still don’t understand, and he hasn’t come back.

Typical. The captain inspects the kitchen.

He’d explained the calculative prep, too, in the kitchen, before Valerie arrived. That’s what the whole coaching staff was doing while I was standing in Meg’s with a phone to my ear. Westmere’s rink is a hundred and ninety-four feet. Six short of regulation, with the corners cut tighter than they should be, an old barn that was grandfathered in when the standards changed, and six feet changes everything. The neutral zone’s a hallway. Their cycle works because there’s less ice to cycle through, so a 1-3-1 built for a full sheet leaves gaps you could skate a truck through.

So you rebuild it. For a smaller box. Shorter passes, tighter gaps, the high forward holding a lane that’s four feet narrower than the one I’ve been drilling.

Halloran had the dimensions taped out on the practice ice by the time Cassian got there. Cones at the real blue lines. Every drill run inside the smaller rectangle until the legs learned where the walls were going to be before the eyes did. And Cassian had stood over it with the iPad and moved my lane a stick-length toward the middle, and said she’ll feel it by Thursday, and I’d stood in a hockey store and felt it already.

“And their goalie cheats glove,” he’d said to the stove, not to me. “Which you know.”

“Which I know.”

“Blocker low. Don’t look at the glove.”

“I don’t look at the glove.”

He hadn’t turned around. But I’d seen his shoulders do the thing they do when he’s pleased and won’t say so.

Knox is at my feet.

Chewing. One of Nikolai’s old gloves, the left, the one that lost its palm to him last week, and he’s working on the cuff now with the deep concentration of a dog who’s found his life’s purpose.

I’ve armed him. I bought four new pairs this afternoon and now there are four old ones in the house with nothing to do but die.

I shouldn’t encourage it. If he gets his teeth into the Arclights we’re fucked, all four of us, and I know that, and I’m sitting here watching him with my chin in my hand not stopping him. Because he’s happy. Because the X over his eye is turned toward the fire and the fire’s turned him gold. Because you only live once, and he’s lived harder than most.

I did talk to them.

When I got home. Before the pole dancer and the pie. I’d walked in with four bags and a recorder in Viper’s jacket and a feeling in my chest like a held breath, and the three of them had been in the kitchen already, and I’d put the bags down and said Naomi was at Meg’s.