Page 294 of Slashed Bonds

“Killian was laughing so hard he had to sit on the floor. She asked him to leave too.”

“So you went back.”

“I didn’t go back.” The hand on the stomach moves, slow, a circle. “If three men can’t hold their shit together for twelve minutes in a dark room, three men can wait. We’ll find out when it comes out. Like animals. Like God intended.”

Tiny Viper. Sex unknown. Parents, four. Odds of it being a goalie, Nikolai says, are a hundred percent.

I kiss her forehead. She lets me. That’s the newest thing about her, the letting, and I treasure it the way I treasure the shoes, which is to say more than I’d admit out loud to anybody.

“Sleep, Mama Malice.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Sleep, Daddy’s Omega.”

“Maddie.”

“Sleeeeep.”

She’s gone again before I’ve stood up. Knox watches me go with the eye that has the X over it, the eye that trusts no one, and I give him a wink because he and I understand each other. We’re both guarding her. We’ve both got a scar we didn’t ask for. We both bite.

* * *

Here’s how a baby shower works when the room is the Blackridge Vipers.

The cake arrives wrong. It was meant to be pink on the inside, as a joke, because Nikolai wanted it blue and Cassian wanted it green and Killian wanted to know why a cake needed a political affiliation. So I ordered pink. The bakery misread the ticket. The cake is black. Charcoal black. Three tiers of it, a small white viper piped on top, and when Greenie carries it in through the stairwell door with his tongue between his teeth like a man carrying a bomb, the whole room goes quiet.

Then Roz, from the kitchenette, over her reading glasses: “That’s the most on-brand mistake I’ve ever seen.”

The twins put the knife they lost into it. Found it in the ice bucket. Where else.

Ansel cuts. Aurel plates. They’ve swapped shirts since this morning to confuse me and they’re wounded that it hasn’t worked, because I know Ansel’s got a chip in his left incisor from Westmere and Aurel parts his hair a quarter inch further right. I know the heel on Aurel’s left sneaker is worn to the outside. I know Greenie’s got nineteen freckles on the bridge of his nose and a twentieth under his jaw that only shows when he laughs with his head back.

I know everything in a room. That’s not a brag. That’s a condition. A thing in my head takes a picture of what’s in front of it and never throws the picture away, and I have more pictures in there than any person should, and most of them I’d like to burn.

The men are at the mill because the women said they could be, which is a sentence that would’ve killed Cassian Vane a year ago. He’s in the corner with a paper plate of black cake, in his glasses, the hidden ones, reading the assembly instructions for a crib that’s been in pieces on the floor since nine this morning while Killian lies on his back under the pieces holding a screw up to the skylight like it’s a jewel. Nikolai’s at the kitchenette with Valerie, who has her tattoo sleeve pushed up and is piping miniature white vipers onto the slices with a bag she stole from the bakery.

It’s loud. It smells like spun sugar frosting, cheap balloon latex, Mori’s black cherry rolling warm off the lounge every time the dog breathes, and twenty-two people’s deodorants losing an argument with the mill’s radiators. It’s the kind of room where you can’t hear your own thoughts, which is how I like my rooms.

My phone rings.

The pink one. The one everybody’s seen. Case with the rhinestones that spell SLASHED, screen cracked in the corner from a practice puck. The number’s long and has a lot of zeroes in the middle, the way association numbers do.

I step into the stairwell with a slice of black cake on a plate.

“This is Maddie.”

“Miss Piers?” A woman’s voice. Crisp, pleasant, reading from something. “Maddie Berrie Piers?”

“That’s me.”

“This is Dana from the Association’s registrar’s office. I’m calling to confirm receipt of your roster paperwork from the Blackridge program. Everything’s been reviewed, and I’m pleased to tell you your filing has been accepted. You’re confirmed as the rostered Omega for Blackridge for the coming season.”

Rostered Omega. On paper. With a signature. The pink girl with the clipboard who the whole league watched take a draw against six men who’d never seen her skate.

“Thanks ever so much,” I say, in the voice. The high one. The one that giggles at the ends of its sentences. “That’s so exciting.”

“There is one thing, before I let you go.” Paper moving. “I’m sure you’re aware the league’s moving to a professional sponsored structure this year. Under the new rules, an Omega rostered at that level needs to be attached to a registered packship. We’ve got your filing from Coach Ibarra. We’ve got your medical clearance from Dr. Lessard’s office. What we don’t have is the pack registration. There’s nothing in the file.”