Page 274 of Slashed Bonds

Roz steers.

We go. Cassian’s hand on my back, Nikolai and Killian falling in behind, through a ballroom that’s turned to watch us go, and the circle behind us stays where it is with its mouths open, and I don’t look back, because looking back is for people who aren’t sure what they left.

When we’re far enough that the chandeliers have changed, I can’t help it.

“Oh, you definitely have a type.”

“Don’t say it like that,” he groans.

He’s blushing. Cassian Vane is blushing, a dark heat up the side of his neck, and he squeezes my arm to make me stop and it doesn’t make me stop.

“Marriage, huh?”

I toss it up at him. Light. The way you’d flip a puck to a man on the bench to see if he catches it.

He looks at me sideways.

And there’s a smirk trying to happen at the corner of his mouth, the one that’s a weapon when it’s for other people and something else entirely when it’s for me, and he hides it badly, and he looks ahead at the photographer Roz is marching us toward.

“Eyes on the prize, Morrigan.”

CHAPTER 43

My Match In Surprises

~MORRIGAN~

“Bitch, are you pregnant or what?”

“Nah.”

I say it to the phone on the floor beside my knee, and then I vomit my life away into a toilet in the visitors’ washroom of the Civic Arena, thirty minutes before the biggest game I’ve skated in five years.

Elegant. Truly. The Omega designer would be proud.

“Fucked around and found out,” I manage, when there’s a gap, “with the tattoo high plummeting on the worst possible day.”

“No fucking shit.”

Maddie’s voice comes up out of the speaker thin and furious with worry, and under it I can hear a concourse, and under that Viper saying something flat that I can’t make out.

“Don’t worry. Viper and I are going to be there in thirty fucking seconds.”

“Thank fucki⁠—“

And I’m puking again.

Yeah. The side effects of this tattoo can go to hell. The lava part. The part with the lake of fire they tell children about, and while they’re going, they can take my exes with them, seeing as I’m meant to face the four of them on a sheet of ice in half an hour and I feel like something scraped off a boot.

Val said nausea. Val said maybe vomiting. Val did not say a week later, in a stall, at the Civic, with my hair in my own fist because the elastic’s somewhere behind the tank.

I’d thought it was the leak. That’s the stupid part. I’d woken at five with my gut in a knot and thought that’s the gala, that’s a body processing what it watched, and I’d gone to the bathroom and processed it for an hour and come out gray and told Cassian at the kitchen table that I was nervous.

He’d looked at me for a long time. He’d let it go. I think he’d decided that a woman who’s about to skate against the men who threw her out a window is allowed to be gray at breakfast.

We left before the entrée. For ice cream. I made that call in a truck with a cup of something mint in my hand and three men not arguing with me, and I’ve been second-guessing it since.

Viper sent one photo at 9:52. No text. An instant-film square, held up to a phone camera, slightly blurred: Naomi Vance in white at a round table with a centerpiece, looking down at a phone in her hand, with her mouth open and her ring hand flat on the tablecloth like she needed the table to hold still. Theo beside her, looking at his own phone. Vance senior, three seats down, standing, with his chair tipped over behind him.