Page 74 of Slashed Bonds

Five years is a long time to be away, and the barns don’t count, not at this level. But I proved, tonight, in front of a roster of Alphas and two coaches and a committee liaison with a clipboard, that I’m not an average player who got lucky once in a beer league.

I have real skill. Dangerous skill.

The kind that draws heads, that makes spectators sit forward, that makes people who’d already decided what I was rearrange the decision in real time.

Validating. That’s the word. I still have it. They didn’t get that part.

But there’s a question behind the validation, and it’s been sitting at the back of my skull since Roz said my name.

Will it be the same when the clock is running?

When the scoreboard’s lit and there are thousands of people in the building, and the pressure isn’t from a drill but from a season, and every one of those thousands is judging, tugging at the strings of a past I’ve spent five years burying, and some of them, somewhere in the dark, are hoping for my downfall?

Some of them are going to be wearing the other jersey.

Some of them are going to have my old name in their mouths.

A touch at my cheek.

I flinch.

Actual, involuntary, full-body flinch, head snapping left, because I’d lost track of the room, and losing track of the room is the one thing I never do.

Nikolai is inches from my face.

He’s crossed the locker room without a sound, and he’s standing in front of my stall, and his expression is…

Odd.

Concerned. That’s the closest word, and it sits wrong on him, because I’ve seen every version of this man’s face in the last four hours and none of them looked like this.

I blink.

Once, twice, trying to work out why he’s this close.

His hand is in my line of sight. It comes back to my cheek, slow, and this time I hold still for it, and he touches me the way you’d touch a jewel you’re frightened of scratching.

Fingertips only. Barely weight.

We look at each other.

It’s intense in a way I don’t have a category for. Longing, maybe, if longing is the word for two people standing in the wreckage of themselves recognizing the same architecture in the other. Yearning. Or plain recognition.

It makes me realize, both of us have walked down roads we’re not proud of, and the pain of them is still as raw as the day it was laid into us.

I can see it in him, and he can see it in me.

And neither of us has ever said so.

“What frightens you?”

I pout.

I feel it happen on my face and can’t stop it, and it must look strange, because I don’t pout. I don’t do expressions. I’ve spent five years teaching my face to be a wall, and in this man’s orbit the wall keeps developing doors.

“Nothing,” I mutter.

I try to turn away. His hand catches my chin.