Page 147 of Slashed Bonds

Chemical sterilization. In a vial. With a rubber stopper. Administered on her knees in a boardroom by a man she’d made a birthday cake for.

It’s controlled. Schedule-restricted, two signatures, a designation physician and a bond-trauma specialist, dispensed in a clinic under supervision with a counselor in the room.

Not in a boardroom. Not from a sideboard. Not by a center with his cuff straightened.

Which means somebody signed for it who shouldn’t have, and somebody filled it who shouldn’t have, and somebody carried it from a clinic to an arena in a jacket pocket, and every one of those somebodies has a name, and Cash’s lawyers are already pulling the dispensing logs for every clinic within two hundred miles of Halbrook for the month in question.

Paper. He loves paper. I love what paper lets Killian do afterward.

And here’s the detail that put the fourth bag on the hook.

It has a half-life. Caesura. It’s designed to clear the system in six weeks so the follow-up panels look clean. Her panel at the district hospital, forty-one hours after the window, would have caught it. Her panel at the private facility, two weeks later, would have caught it.

Nobody flagged it. Or somebody did, and the flag went in a drawer, and the drawer’s in Halbrook.

Ruin her life. Then make sure she can never build another one with anyone else. As if the PTSD weren’t enough. As if the terror of ever letting another set of men near her, men who are supposed to love her, protect her, by biology, by design, weren’t trauma enough on its own.

No. Force it. Make it biological. Make sure she never gets a shot.

And what I can’t comprehend, what I’ve put my fist through three bags trying to comprehend, is what she did to deserve any of it.

Being great? Being driven? Wanting the top of a sport at seventeen, as a woman, as an Omega, in a program that bonded its girls early so they’d travel quietly and not make trouble?

Is that the crime? Not being born with a cock?

She wasn’t allowed to rage on the ice the way the rest of us rage. She wasn’t allowed to be the best thing in the building and act like it. Having a pussy, apparently, means the world gets to walk over you like you’re the bottom of the food chain, and when you don’t lie down for it, the world sends a woman with a gold watch to correct the posture.

And they moved on.

All of them. Still skating. Still chasing the same tournament the rest of us chase. Still on the ice in Halbrook with a screen in a room with good furniture, laughing at eleven minutes of footage like it’s a highlight reel.

And if that weren’t enough to put me in a Switch, Cash had to say the last thing.

She was pregnant.

With their child. Six weeks, maybe seven. Probably from a night she didn’t choose, because that’s what this society does with Omegas, it decides what they’re for and then it uses them for it and calls it a bond.

And they threw her out a window.

And called her trash.

I close my eyes.

Breathe. In through the nose, the way she does. My body’s shaking. Sweat’s running off my chin onto the mat in a steady drip I can hear.

Because I’m picturing it.

A small Mori. That’s the thing my head does to me, in the dark behind my eyes. A kid with her eyes, those dark ones with the whole night sky’s worth of damage in them, except no damage, because nothing’s happened yet. Black hair. A face that’s never once had to learn what the world is, lit up with the kind of excitement you only get before you’ve been taught not to.

The happiest version of her. The one she can never be, now, in this life, because wounds like hers don’t heal. They scar. They leave evidence.

There’s a puck on a string in my closet with her mouth on it. I’ve looked at it every night for nine months and called it a trophy, a charm, a joke, and I understood last night at minute four that it’s none of those things.

It’s the only thing I’ve got of hers that nobody took.

Because that’s the arithmetic I keep arriving at, at two in the morning, at four, now. Everything else about her, somebody has handled first. Her name went through a committee. Her body went through a boardroom. Her future went through a vial. The men who were supposed to be hers got to her first, and they took every piece worth taking, and then they laughed about it in a room with good furniture.

Except the puck. The puck she left on a glass in a building where nobody knew her name, for a man in a mask who didn’t know it either.