Page 178 of Slashed Bonds

Then us.

He reads our names the way a man reads a list he didn’t write. Vane. Graves. Volkov. The crowd does the rest. When he gets to mine he pauses, a half beat, and I hear him decide how to say it.

“And at left wing, number thirteen… Morrigan Crowe.”

No title. No Omega. He skips it the way you skip a word you’ve been told not to say, and the building hears the skip and fills it in on its own, and the sound that comes back is three sounds at once. Glee. Disgust. And that third thing, from the kid and the woman with her hand on her chest, that I’m going to have to find a name for.

“Teams, ready up.”

We skate as a unit to the bench.

Helmets. Mine’s black with the viper on the side, the one piece of the old design that survived, and I buckle it under my chin and the red on my mouth is gone now, under the cage, where it belongs. Nikolai’s swapping his mask for his goalie cage with his back to the crowd, in the order he does it, left strap then right, and I watch him do it and don’t say anything.

Then he turns.

And he taps my stick with his. Once, on the blade, the way he said he would five days ago in a locker room when he was telling me every superstition he had and I was pretending not to listen.

Before the anthem. He’s making it a thing. I’m a thing now in a goalie’s rituals.

I tap his back.

The anthem happens. I don’t hear it. I stand on the blue line with my helmet off and my hand on my chest and I look at the far net, at Brandt, who’s looking back at me the way goalies look at shooters they’ve been warned about.

Good. Be warned.

And then the line goes out.

Cassian to the dot. Me to his left on the hash marks with Halvard across from me, a big kid with a local boy’s confidence and a stick he holds too tight. Dubois right. Killian behind us on the left point, and the second D beside him, and Nikolai in the near net with the good ice, which we won on the toss, which Cassian took like a man who already knew.

I settle.

Knees bent. Stick on the ice. Weight on the balls of my feet the way my father taught me on a pond before anyone knew what I’d be. The building’s noise goes somewhere far off, the way it does, and under it I can hear the small sounds. Skates settling. Halvard’s breath. The linesman’s glove on the puck.

And I look at Cassian.

Bent over the dot, stick down, every muscle in his back locked in on the puck in the linesman’s hand. He’s not looking at anything else. He never does. The whole world for him right now is a four-inch disc of rubber and the hand that holds it.

Then he looks at me.

As if he felt it. As if my eyes on his back have weight, and he turns his head the inch it takes, and his eyes find mine through two cages and a yard of Ashford ice.

And he tilts his head.

A quarter inch. To the left, toward Halvard, toward the wall I’m going to take away from him on the first shift, toward the whole game laid out in four marker colors on an iPad in a bag under the bench. The look lasts a second. It’s reassurance, and it’s more than reassurance.

It’s a door opening.

You’re in my domain, Malice. Use it.

I know what it means, because he told me in a bathroom with my nails in his throat. The captain of the Blackridge Vipers has looked at me on a faceoff dot in front of ten thousand people and given me the one thing I’ve never had on a sheet of ice.

His permission to slash through this game effortlessly and leave no crumbs behind…

CHAPTER 24

Running The Fucking Show

~CASSIAN~