Page 275 of Slashed Bonds

That was all. That was enough.

By this morning it was everywhere. Not the way we were everywhere, not a hashtag. The other way. The business pages. A sports-performance subsidiary in liquidation. A sponsorship company with a hole in its books the size of a building. Four fathers and a casino with paperwork. A frat house and a van and a girl in a yellow dress who’d walked out of a clinic two towns over with her name intact and her story not. And a document, two years long, with a kid’s position and a cast in it.

Teller. In print. Not a hashtag with a pun in it. A name on a page in a paper my father used to read.

The league opened a review at eight. The league also said the semifinal would go ahead as scheduled, because on paper nothing had changed about either roster, and the league reads paper.

So they’re here. Four men whose fathers are being asked questions in rooms with no windows, dressing in a room down the hall, and in thirty minutes they’re going to skate out onto a sheet of ice with twelve thousand people who read the paper this morning.

And I’m on a floor.

The guys don’t know.

That’s the part that’s going to fuck me. I came in with the team, dressed with the team, taped my stick with the team and put the red on my mouth in front of a mirror with Dubois trying not to watch, and then I said washroom and walked out of the room at a pace I’d hoped read as casual, and that was eleven minutes ago, and I’ve been on my knees for nine of them.

One look. That’s all it’ll take. Cassian reads which version of me is in a room; he’ll read a fever off me from the bench door, and he’ll sit me down, and the semifinal I’ve been pointing my whole body at for a month will happen while I’m in a hoodie behind the glass.

A twin takes my wing. That’s the lineup math and I can do it from the floor. Ansel or Aurel, nobody will know which, up on the first line with Cassian and Dubois, and the other one on the second with Greenie. The power play loses its half-wall. The weak-side dot loses the woman who counted her strides to it.

Dorian slides and nobody’s there. The pass gets through. Silas’s teams screen with the stick down and Nikolai’s got his glove high through the bodies and it won’t matter, because the shot’s coming from a dot that was supposed to have a body on it.

I’ve drawn that play in my head for a month. I know every frame of it. And the frame where it works has me in it, and I’m in a stall.

Through the wall, faint, the sound of the room. Tape being pulled. Somebody’s music, the drumline Killian plays before games that nobody else can stand. Halloran’s voice, low, saying the thing he says. And under it, a quiet I can feel from here that’s Cassian standing by the whiteboard with the lineup on it, looking at the door I went out of, counting.

Eleven minutes. He’s counting. He’s going to send someone in a minute, and it’s going to be the wrong someone.

So much for vengeful consequences.

And it’s funny, with my forehead on my wrist and the porcelain cold against my arm, how the thing I wanted looks from down here.

I wanted the thrill. The full, filling thrill of facing Theo and the others on the ice, of taking a pass in the shins on a dot they didn’t think I’d be standing on, of proving something to four men who⁠—

Who what. Who never respected you when you were the piece they moved. Why would they respect you as the piece across the board? Before the biggest game of their careers? Men like that don’t learn respect from losing. They learn it from nothing.

And yet.

The dot. I keep coming back to the dot. Not Theo’s face across it. The dot itself, the red circle on a neutral sheet, twelve strides from the bench door, where a woman was going to stand with her eyes shut and feel a pass come into her shins and hear twelve thousand people hear it. That wasn’t for him. I’d told myself it was for him and it wasn’t. It was for a girl with a braid on a bench who was told what Omegas could and couldn’t do.

She’s the one I wanted to show. She’s the one who’s going to be watching from a hoodie behind the glass.

Twelve thousand. The building’s full. I heard it fill from the room, the sound coming up through the floor in stages the way it did at Ashford, except this isn’t Ashford’s house or ours, it’s nobody’s, and the noise has a different shape when it belongs to no one. Half of it came for the rejects. Half came for the empire with its name on a plaque. And some number in the middle came because they read a paper this morning and wanted to see what a man looks like on a dot the day his father’s been asked about a van.

It sounds like bullshit from the floor. What am I proving. To whom.

And the crazy part, the part that’s got its own stall in my head and is sitting in it laughing, is that I don’t need to anymore. None of it. Because last night, in a ballroom, between a red carpet and a bowl of ice cream, three executives from an association with a name too long to say shook hands with Roz, with Halloran, and then with the four of us, and there are contracts. Real ones. With the organization that runs the league the league answers to, the kind with signatures, lawyers, numbers that have commas in them for life.

And the first thing they wrote into the paper, before the money, before the roster, was a year.

A year off. Paid. To enjoy what we’d built, they said, with a phrase I’d have laughed at a month ago. Soul searching. Rest. Travel. Figure out what the four of you want to be when you’re not being a story.

Am I complaining? Hell to the fucking no.

A year of paid leave to travel, eat, and fuck in every public place on three continents without getting caught, with three Alphas who sat me down at the kitchen table on Tuesday and said invest the cheque, we’ll pay for everything, in a tone that didn’t invite amendments. That’s the life. Soft girl era, unlocked. Hashtag, if Maddie has her way, and Maddie always has her way.

But fuck.

I’d forgotten what side effects are. How they don’t care about your plans. How they arrive on the day, not the day after, and sit in your gut like a stone with a grudge. My ass is raw from a morning that started at five with a thing I’m not going to describe to anyone, ever, and now the other end’s joined in, and I’m on a floor at the Civic with the bass of twelve thousand people coming through the tile.