Page 16 of Slashed Bonds

That was the trade.

The grief stays, the self-pity goes, and what grows in the empty space is something with a lower body temperature and better aim.

I text back.

ME: Time and cut.

SULLY: 8. 60/40. bring the dog, he intimidates people

ME: He intimidates you.

SULLY: he looked at me last week like he knew about the thing

ME: He does know about the thing.

I toss the phone onto the duvet, drag black tights, a tank and my leather jacket out of the dresser, and stand there for a second waiting for the room to settle.

“Shower and out the door I go,” I tell nobody.

Knox thumps his tail against the bed frame.

“And brush my teeth, I guess.”

It’s a nuisance getting clean when I’ll be soaked through in three hours, but this is my life now, and at some point you either embrace the thing, or you let it embrace you.

The water runs hot enough to fog the whole room.

I stand under it with my forearms braced against the tile and let the heat work on the ache running from my hip down into my right calf, where the nerves misfire when the temperature drops or when I’ve been on the floor of a bathroom for an hour.

Steam catches in my throat.

For a while there’s nothing in my head at all, which is the closest thing to peace I get outside a rink.

Afterward I clear a circle in the mirror with my palm and take inventory, the way I do every day, because avoiding it once means avoiding it forever.

Black hair to the middle of my back, blood-red running through it, the bangs I keep long enough to hide behind. Skin the shade of skim milk. A body that never forgot what it was built for, even during the years it wasn’t allowed to use it.

My forearms.

Four thick ridges across each one, silvered now, raised enough to catch the light. The tattoo artist offered to cover them, back when I first started collecting ink, and I told her no.

They’re not a secret. They’re a receipt.

Then my throat.

The bond scar sits at the base of my neck, and the blackwork over it is the best money I’ve ever spent. Nightshade in full bloom. Thorned vines climbing the tendon. A pair of shattered wings folded down toward my collarbone, and a skeletal moth in the center of it with its wings pinned open.

Threaded through all of it, if you know to look, are the severed stems.

One for each of them.

The art doesn’t erase the scar. It was never supposed to.

It claims it.

Meds next, lined up on the shelf in the order the pharmacist swears is optimal and I follow because arguing with a pharmacist is a losing sport.

The bond-trauma stabilizer, which is the one that owns my mornings. The hormonal regulator. The sleep aid I take three nights a week and no more, since I’ve read the file on what it does past that. Suppressants for when a room becomes more Alpha than I can process.